Almost 4,000 people will be diagnosed with ALL this year, mostly children. Often, children with ALL are treated on an out-patient basis, meaning that parents are given prescription for various drugs, including chemotherapeutic agents and directions for how these drugs should be administered. However, no prior research has ever been done to determine how accurately these drugs are being given.
"We wanted to see if the medicine was being prescribed and administered as intended," said Taylor. So, Taylor and colleagues looked for any errors that occurred in 69 children receiving outpatient chemotherapy treatment for ALL.
During the two months of the study, ten percent of the children did not receive their chemotherapy drug correctly, and there was at least one medication error in over 18 percent of the patients. Most of these mistakes were caused by parents not giving the medication as directed, while a few were a result of prescribing errors by the doctor. None of the errors were caused by the pharmacy.
Fortunately, most of the errors that were made during the course of the study will not impact the patient's treatment. However, three of these children did not receive a particular medication at the correct time, which increases their risk for a relapse, while one patient had a medication overdose and was at risk for a serious infection.
"These findings suggest that parents have difficulty administering the complicated ALL medication," said Dr. Richard Molteni, medical director at Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center.
To lower the rate of medication errors, Molteni recommends several possible tools that could increase the accuracy of drug administration, such as "prescribing medication electronically as opposed to hand-written, and simplifying at-home medication directions for patients and parents."
