HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT OF HARMING YOURSELF? Part of the health professionals in Canada are structured with homicidal doctors, who are drugging their patients knowing the side
effects of the prescription drugs Medicine in Canada is a blooming business for the well paid health system workers
and the big pharmaceutical corporations, but agonizing for the patients because
the goal of the doctors are to keep under their control people awaiting medical
care. Likewise many children in the Canadian hospitals are treated as guinea pigs;
doctor’s work is to keep documenting and prolonging their aliments until the
lives of children are completely shattered. These situations not only so, but
also excruciate the lives of the parents, because the health teams of
tormentors deliberately are causing mental anguish in the lives of the family.
Crimes of this magnitude are committed every day in this country with the help
of the Minister of health, and the impunity of the authorities.
'That's four children who died': Hospital drug errors blamed for child
deaths in new report
Child deaths in Canadian hospitals blamed on drug
errors
Medication errors are occurring
frequently on pediatric wards, with “devastating” impact on children and their
families, concludes a new survey of Canadian hospitals that found four deaths
over the three-month span studied, and an average of 20 drug-administration
mistakes per hospital ward. “I saw four lethal errors, which
doesn’t seem like very much, but that’s four children who died,” Kim Sears, a
Queen’s University nursing professor and the lead researcher, noted in an
interview. “Each site had at least one child die in it during the three months,
because of a medication … I had only 18 [hospital wards] in total — that’s a
very small sample.”
While many of the mix-ups were near-misses, 14% were potentially lethal,
the survey of nursing staff found, adding to a growing body of knowledge on the
harm inadvertently done to patients in hospital. Nurses who took part in the anonymous
survey in three provinces were most likely to blame heavy workload, distraction
and poor communication for the mistakes, said the study just published in the Journal
of Pediatric Nursing.
Related
The study suggests individual
negligence is rarely to blame for such incidents, describing the causes as
mostly systemic. It urges better-designed work spaces, improved communication
between staff, and more widespread pediatric training for nurses to curb the
rate of mistakes. Though the research was conducted a few years ago — but only
published this month — Prof. Sears said she believes the issues remain largely
unchanged. One expert in the
field said the findings do not seem surprising, but stressed that hospitals are
working hard to alleviate some of the problems. “We’re tackling this as best as we can,” said Christine
Koczmara, a senior analyst with the Institute for Safe Medication Practices. Once a
closely guarded secret in the health care system, treatment errors — now
usually called adverse events — have attracted increasing attention in the last
decade as hospitals strive to increase patient safety. A
Canadian study published last year concluded that close to 10% of the child
patients it reviewed at 22 hospitals had suffered adverse events, with
medication-related incidents ranked as the second-largest source of problems
behind surgery. Prof.
Sears’ research, however, may be the first in Canada to look specifically at
the key area of medication administration for pediatric patients, giving a more
graphic picture of how problems occur. Errors are occurring frequently and are
ultimately devastating to children and their families. The ramifications of an
error are overwhelming and can have a profound impact on the nurse, patient and
system The
potential for disaster is greater with child patients, given that nurses often
have to mix up the medication at the bedside, quantities of drug are so small
that a dangerously large dose may not be readily noticeable, and widely varying
body sizes require careful calculation of dosages, said Prof. Sears. Her study
had nurses working on a total of 440 patient beds at three hospitals — in
eastern, central and western Canada — fill out anonymous forms when a mistake
happened while giving drugs to patients.
The survey recorded 372 errors over the three months, including 127 near
misses where the mishap was caught before the child received their medication,
and 245 actual errors. As well as the four
deaths, 51 were graded as potentially lethal, 20 as serious, 112 as significant
and 185 minimal. Nurses end up at a children’s
hospital, but they haven’t had much experience with children. That’s kind of
scary Giving children their medication at the wrong
time — instead of within the recommended half-hour window to avoid incorrect
dosing — was the most common slip-up, followed by administering the wrong dose,
and feeding patients the incorrect drug, the study found. “[Errors]
are occurring frequently and are ultimately devastating to children and their
families,” the paper says. “The
ramifications of an error are overwhelming and can have a profound impact on
the nurse, patient and system.” Prof.
Sears said nurses need bigger, better-lit spaces in which to prepare
medications, and face fewer distractions from other staff. Some nursing schools
also do not offer pediatric
rotations, despite the popularity of the work within the profession, she said. “So [nurses] end up at a
children’s hospital, but they haven’t had much experience with children. That’s
kind of scary.”
Ms. Koczmara confirmed that distraction of professionals as they
administer drugs is a well-documented problem that the system is trying to
alleviate.
Some hospitals have even experimented with having staff wear jackets of
a particular colour that indicate to co-workers they are at a crucial point in
treating a patient and should not be distracted, said Ms. Koczmara.
