Patient Safety Movement Foundation on a mission of getting to zero preventable deaths

Patient Safety Movement Foundation on a mission of getting to zero preventable deaths

Press and media
Thursday, 13 December 2018
Patient Safety Movement (PSM) a non-profit organization committed to eliminating the more than 4,800,000 preventable deaths that occur in hospitals across the world every year joined us in marking PSD2018. They do this through encouraging hospitals to implement Actionable Patient Safety Solutions (APSS) that are demonstrating success in eliminating preventable deaths as well as by securing pledges from medical technology companies to share their data. Speaking to IAPO, they now share what they are doing to drive and support safe medication and healthcare for all.
At the Patient Safety Movement, we have worked since 2012 to bring the healthcare community together to eliminate preventable patient deaths in hospitals. Although patient safety has been seen as a priority for years, medical errors count as the third leading cause of preventable patient deaths in hospitals in the United States and the fourteenth worldwide. 
 
We therefore feel compelled to support the 6th annual Patient Solidarity Day because no patient should be harmed or lose their lives because a medication is not safely prescribed or administered. This aligns with our goal of ZERO preventable deaths by 2020. 
In the United States, adverse drug events (ADEs) account for nearly 700,000 emergency department visits and 100,000 hospitalizations every year. Nearly 5% of hospitalized patients experience an adverse drug event, making them one of the most common types of inpatient errors.  (Agency for Heathcare Research and Quality, 2018)
 
And these aren’t just numbers, they represent people. From wrong medication to over medicating, the effects of medication error are serious and sometimes fatal. Here are just a few of the many patients who have lost their lives from unsafe medication.
 
  • Seventeen-month-old Josh Barron was admitted to the hospital following an accident. Barron died from preventable causes after his pharmacist mistakenly gave him five times the amount of phenytoin needed for the head seizures that he was having. 
  • Eighteen-month-old Emily Jerry was killed by an overdose of sodium chloride in her chemotherapy IV bag.
  • Adult John LaChance died following routine shoulder surgery due to unmonitored opioid-induced respiratory depression. 
 
Medication errors are completely preventable, and no one should be harmed from these kinds of errors. At the Patient Safety Movement, we are working to give patient’s a voice.  We’ve worked with leading medical experts, hospital administrators, patient advocates and more to develop free, evidence-based processes, called Actionable Patient Safety Solutions (APSS), which can help prevent these kinds of errors. We have developed Actionable Patient Safety Solutions for the following:
  • Medication Errors
  • Antimicrobial Stewardship – The Role of Pharmacy & the Microbiology Lab in Patient Safety
  • Improving the Prevention of Severe Hypoglycemia
  • Pediatric Adverse Drug Events
  • Standardizing and Safeguarding Medication Administration
  • Drug Shortages
 
To help prevent medication errors, we need everyone – medical professionals and the public to speak up! The Patient Safety Movement will bring the medical community together for the 7th Annual World Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit in Huntington Beach, California on January 18-19, 2019. To register, click here