Posted on 02/09/2005 7:43:50 AM PST by Mike Bates
Beware not the ides but the start of March – and April and May and every month. In the first few days of each month, fatalities due to medication errors rise by as much as 25 percent above normal, according to new research by University of California, San Diego sociologist David Phillips.
Published in the January issue of Pharmacotherapy, the journal of the American College of Clinical Pharmacy, the study is the first to document a beginning-of-the-month spike in deaths attributed to mistakes in prescription drugs.
The primary suspect, Phillips says, is a beginning-of-the-month increase in pharmacy workloads and a consequent increase in their error rates.
“Government assistance payments to the old, the sick and the poor are typically received at the beginning of each month. Because of this, there is a beginning-of-the-month spike in purchases of prescription medicines,” Phillips says. “Pharmacy workloads go up and – in line with both evidence and experience – error rates go up as well. Our data suggest that the mortality spike occurs at least partly because of this phenomenon.”
Phillips and his coauthors examined all United States death certificates from 1979 through 2000 to analyze the 131,952 deaths classified as fatal poisoning accidents from drugs. A small number, 3.2 percent, of the deaths were from adverse effects of the right drug in the right dose. The vast majority, 96.8 percent, resulted from medication errors – the “wrong drug given or taken,” or “accidental overdose of drug,” or “drug taken inadvertently.”
(Excerpt) Read more at ucsdnews.ucsd.edu ...
BINGO!
<-would wager that OD's also spike 1st of month
by hospitals/medical "mistakes" than in war -
where is the hue and cry from our politicians?
Some of them are just too busy fretting over our treatment of terrorist prisoners to notice this sort of thing.
225000 people per year is equal to 2 jumbo jets crashing every day. Where is the outrage? The new AMA slogan "If we can't bankrupt you we'll kill you!"
"I wonder if there is any correlation between when the OD's occur and the time of the month when the welfare checks arrive."
My thoughts exactly.
The story did not make it clear if the data included overdoses related to common consumer errors such as taking medications while too intoxicated, or being too impaired to prevent small children from helping themselves to your meds.
I have witnessed a number of such cases over the years. I have also seen a tendency for some people to enjoy alcohol or drugs a little too much when the checks come in. I wonder if this is part of what the researcher was measuring.
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