Less Meds May Reduce Death

Hospitals are a major entity throughout the healthcare industry. The hospital as a place, is a critical point in a patient's case where what happens in the hospitals, and the care a patient receives, is crucial to their particular health issue. But we've spoken about issues hospitals face such as C.diff and antibiotic resistance infections, as well as pain medication shortages. But are hospitals giving administering too many medications? 

A recently release analysis graded more than 2500 U.S. hospitals on safety. More than 1,000 of the hospitals received a grade of C or worse. 

Why?

A proposed way to make hospitals much safer, when it comes to patient care and even more cost effective and less expensive for the patient could be to reduce the number of medicines patients are given when they're in the hospitals. 

Experts are proposing, as part of the findings in this analysis, to halt the use of medications at patient admission unless a compelling medical reason exists to continue the use of them during the patient's stay. 

The Institute of Medicine estimates that the rate of medication errors in hospitals is one error per patient per day. Part of what makes hospital care dangerous is complexity. In the US, it is common for patients to be on nine or 10 medications when they are admitted to the hospital.

The more medicines the patient is on, the more difficult it is to care for them safely and effectively. Not surprisingly, the risk of being harmed by a medicine increases as the number of medicines one is on increases since the risk of drug-drug interactions and drug-disease interactions increases. But it is also because each new medicine creates multiple opportunities for wrong drug errors, wrong dose errors, and so on.

A nationwide study found that older adults taking medication, about 42% were taking at least one that was appropriate.