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House Passage of Medical Error Reporting Bill
Applauded by Pharmacists
July 28, 2005 - The American Society of
Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) praised legislation passed Tuesday by
the U.S. House of Representatives that establishes a non-punitive system
enabling health care providers to voluntarily report medical errors or
near misses. The Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act (S. 544)
creates a legal framework to log errors, catalog reports, and identify
trends, essential elements in creating a culture of safety to improve
the quality of medical care.
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For more information on this bill go to the Library
of Congress site at
http://thomas.loc.gov/ and insert S. 544 in the search box.
This is a tremendous success for patients, as well
as ASHP and the health care organizations that partnered with us to
champion this important legislation, said ASHP president Jill Martin,
Pharm. D., FASHP, associate professor of pharmacy practice, University
of Cincinnati College of Pharmacy and director of transplant outcomes at
University Hospital, Cincinnati, Ohio. Patients in America will be
safer when medical errors are reported so that others can learn to avoid
them, Martin said.
ASHP has worked closely with Congress to develop
this legislation, since the Institute of Medicine (IOM) published its
1999 report, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health Care System. The
IOM report estimated that medical errors may cause nearly 100,000 deaths
each year.
This legislation is an important step toward
creating a fail-safe health care system, said Henri R. Manasse, Jr.,
Ph.D., Sc.D., ASHP executive vice president and CEO. It is essential
that pharmacists and other health care providers can share information
when error happens, so that the events can be analyzed and prevented
from occurring again.
For more than 60 years, ASHP has helped pharmacists
who practice in hospitals and health systems improve medication use and
enhance patient safety. The Society's 30,000 members include pharmacists
and pharmacy technicians who practice in inpatient, outpatient,
home-care, and long-term-care settings, as well as pharmacy students.
For more information visit ASHP's Web site,
http://www.ashp.org, or its consumer Web site,
http://www.SafeMedication.com.
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