According to a new study, with researchers from the Universities of Leeds, London and Surrey examining data from 256-residents from 55-care homes across England, over two-thirds of the elderly in care homes are quite often the victims suffer of medication mix-ups.
As a result of the poor drugs treatment, elderly people suffered from health problems, including a fall in their quality of life. A combination of over-worked staff, poor teamwork and lack of training seems to be the lead cause in mistakes in prescribing, dispensing and administration of drugs.
The study found two errors per person were common, as with a resident who typically took eight different medications, with around 70% of those observed subject to one or more errors.
On a scale of zero to 10, with 10 meaning death, researchers found the potential harm was 2.6 for prescribing errors; 3.7 for monitoring errors; 2.1 for administrative errors; and two for dispensing errors. Mostly, this was due to staff lacking knowledge of which medicines should be given with food, and did not always know how to administer inhalers, or even order adequate drug supplies.
The study researched care homes in West Yorkshire, Cambridgeshire and central London, including interviewing care home staff, doctors and pharmacists.
What it found was ‘well-intentioned people doing their best but in an unco-ordinated way,’ with management working to budgets contributing in a big way, as too the general lack of communication, with seven out of ten care home residents being given incorrect doses of medication or wrong drugs, due to overworked staff and poor teamwork.
With many unmonitored for side effects, and many even going without their treatments. The drugs most likely to go unchecked for possible side-effects were heart drugs and drugs for treating underactive thyroids. The study has been published in the journal Quality and Safety in Health Care.
