Page 16 - Medication Errors News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Don't mix with the effects of alcohol to cause sedation, especially sleeping pills and anti-depressants. >> another big issue you were talking about during the commercial break, medication errors, we always joke, it's kind of a national joke, the doctors have the worst handwriting in the world and you get the prescription and you're like, i hope the pharmacist can read this, this is not a laughing matter. >> it is not a laughing matter. there are 7,000 deaths every year because of this. either from ineligible handwriting, from the medication itself or the dosages. so what we are looking at is ...

Taylee went purple. she was purple. it was like she died in my arms. she just stopped breathing. >> reporter: turns out a nurse mistakenly gave her an iv of morphine intended for her mother. >> there should be no way that a very mall small iv line of a 4 1/2-pound baby should be confused with that of a full-grown woman. that should not happen. >> reporter: according to researchers mistakes like that are more common than we realize. they looked at 795 patient records, following the method most hospitals use to report mistakes, they found just 35 errors. when they used a new, more comprehensive ...

Hospital errors might be ten times higher than previously thought. affecting one in three patients. >> our senior medical correspondent elizabeth cohen joins us from atlanta with the details on this. we're pretty surprised by these numbers. >> the numbers are very high. other studies have found in this ballpark, what they did was they used a new way of analyzing when things go wrong at the hospital. because when things go wrong. sometimes doctors will say that was fate, that's just the way it happened. maybe not. maybe it's because mistakes are being made. >> are these small oversights or thin...

To go on. >> kanlg larson, thank you very much. next on reporter roulette, elizabeth cohen with scary prospects for anyone who has to be a patient in a hospital, elizabeth. >> reporter: don, these numbers are pretty disturbing, researchers looked at three hospitals in the united states and found that one out of three people will have what's call and as verse event, a fancy way of saying something goes wrong and it is likely because somebody at the hospital made a mistake. now, what kinds of mistakes are we talking about? take a look at. this the most common were medication errors, the medica...

But the ones they identified were really ones that the doctor or the nurse should have done differently. also hospital infections. many, many times, people would say nearly all times that you get an infection in the hospital, it could have been prevented. someone didn't do something they should have done. and that's why you got the infection. >> here's where money comes into play. you know hospital infections are so expensive. insurance companies and even medicare and medicaid programs are telling hospitals we're not going to pay if the infection is your fault, we're not paying for that. the h...