Plan to reduce medication error deaths unveiled
Until the age of 16 in 2004, Sekgabo Maruping was a normal child doing Form 3 at Tshegetsang CJSS in Molepolole, her home village. Yet when she graduated at senior secondary school five years later, she did so as a special needs student – because she had become completely deaf.
This is a young woman who for sweet 16 years had lived a bubbly and normal life without any form of disability. Her loss of hearing was a result of a medical mistake. Her ailment had only been the cancer of the blood, and efforts to cure her of the disease saw her through three medical institutions - Scottish Livingstone Hospital in Molepolole, Princess Marina Referral Hospital in Gaborone, and McDonald Private Hospital in South Africa.
But it was the process of rendering her medical assistance that eventually resulted in her losing her sense of hearing, until she could hear nothing at all. The cancer was successfully dealt with, but she had to adapt to a new life that saw her eventually go through special needs education, and continue life as a deaf person.
She is only one of the millions of patients around the world, whose medical treatment for one manageable disease has resulted in an even more chronic ailment. It is such misdemeanours that have seen the World Health Organisation (WHO) step in to intervene. The health body has since unveiled a global plan to ensure that at least in the next five years, they halve these adverse drug effects caused by medical errors.
The Global Patient Safety Challenge-Medication Safety seeks to strengthen the healthcare systems to reduce “feebleness” linked to medication errors that can be fatal and place an enormous and unnecessary strain on national health budgets. Medication errors can be caused by health worker fatigue, overcrowding, staff shortages, poor training and the wrong information being given to patients, the health body says. Alarmingly, such errors cause at least one death every day and injure approximately 1.3 million people annually in the United States alone.
In a statement, Dr Margaret Chan, the WHO director-general, says: “We all expect to be helped, not harmed, when we take medication.” The United Nations agency also advocates for the awareness among patients of the dangers of incorrect and inconsistent use of certain drugs. The guidelines, unveiled in Geneva recently, also lay out standards and principles of drug prescription, distribution and consumption. In low- and middle-income countries such as Botswana, the effect is about twice as much in terms of the number of years of healthy life lost, but there is barely any data on this, WHO points out.
The Challenge calls on countries to take early priority action to address these key factors: including medicines with a high risk of harm if used improperly; patients who take multiple medications for different diseases and conditions; and patients going through transitions of care, to reduce medication errors and harm to patients. This is WHO’s third global patient safety challenge, following the Clean Care is Safe Care challenge on hand hygiene in 2005 and the Safe Surgery Saves Lives challenge in 2008. It is hoped the challenge will help reduce cases similar to that of Maruping, who despite being thankful to the medical fraternity for healing her cancer, has had to live a new life because of the side-effects of her medical treatment. Her progression to senior secondary school was inevitably delayed, and after struggling with illness at Kgari Sechele Senior Secondary School, was eventually admitted to Maun Senior Secondary School where there was a unit for learners with hearing impairment.