Medication errors: not just a few "bad apples"
Objective: The purpose of this study is to describe the distribution of medication errors among physicians.Design: Data on a cohort of internal medicine physicians were gathered prospectively over a seven-month period.Setting: The study was conducted in four adult primary care practices.Participants: Twenty-four physicians from Boston, MA participated in this study. A total of 661 patients agreed to participate in the study. The researchers surveyed patients to identify possible adverse drug events (ADEs). This information was supplemented by a chart review for each participating patient.Measurements: The principal measurement collected in this study was total medication errors per physician. The number of prescriptions written during the study period was also collected.Results: Twenty-two of the 24 physicians made at least one error. Although there was one outlier, the error rate among this cohort of physician was evenly distributed.Conclusion: The wide distribution of errors among this group of physicians undermines the argument that the majority of medication errors are due to a "few bad apples,"