Medical error

A medical error is a preventable adverse effect of care ("iatrogenesis"), whether or not it is evident or harmful to the patient. This might include an inaccurate or incomplete diagnosis or treatment of a disease, injury, syndrome, behavior, infection, or other ailment. The word error in medicine is used as a label for nearly all of the clinical incidents that harm patients. Medical errors are often described as human preventable errors in healthcare. Whether the label is a medical error or human error, one definition used in medicine says that it occurs when a healthcare provider chooses an inappropriate method of care, improperly executes an appropriate method of care, or reads the wrong CT scan. It has been said that the definition should be the subject of more debate. For instance, studies of hand hygiene compliance of physicians in an ICU show that compliance varied from 19% to 85%. The deaths that result from infections caught as a result of treatment providers improperly executing an appropriate method of care by not complying with known safety standards for hand hygiene are difficult to regard as innocent accidents or mistakes. There are many types of medical error, from minor to major, and causality is often poorly determined. There are many taxonomies for classifying medical errors. There is no single definition of diagnostic error, reflecting in part the dual nature of the word diagnosis, which is both a noun (the name of the assigned disease; diagnosis is a label) and a verb (the act of arriving at a diagnosis; diagnosis is a process). At the present time, there are at least 4 definitions of diagnostic error in active use: Graber et al. defined diagnostic error as a diagnosis that is wrong, egregiously delayed, or missed altogether. This is a 'label' definition, and can only be applied in retrospect, using some gold standard (for example, autopsy findings or a definitive laboratory test) to confirm the correct diagnosis. Many diagnostic errors fit several of these criteria; the categories overlap.

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Adverse effect

An adverse effect is an undesired harmful effect resulting from a medication or other intervention, such as surgery. An adverse effect may be termed a "side effect", when judged to be secondary to a main or therapeutic effect. The term complication is similar to adverse effect, but the latter is typically used in pharmacological contexts, or when the negative effect is expected or common. If the negative effect results from an unsuitable or incorrect dosage or procedure, this is called a medical error and not an adverse effect.

Medical prescription

A prescription, often abbreviated or Rx, is a formal communication from a physician or other registered healthcare professional to a pharmacist, authorizing them to dispense a specific prescription drug for a specific patient. Historically, it was a physician's instruction to an apothecary listing the materials to be compounded into a treatmentthe symbol (a capital letter R, crossed to indicate abbreviation) comes from the first word of a medieval prescription, Latin (), that gave the list of the materials to be compounded.

Medical error

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