Group backs verbal order read-back safety goal
Accreditation Connection, July 10, 2006
A Patient Safety Advisory article suggests patients are at greater risk of medication errors when drugs are ordered verbally or over the telephone.
The June 2006 article, "Improving the Safety of Telephone or Verbal Orders", printed by the independent, Pennsylvania state agency, supports JCAHO's National Patient Safety Goal for read-back procedures, in which the person receiving an order writes it down, reads it back, and gets confirmation that it was understood correctly.
"Medical errors are more likely to occur with verbal orders because interpreting speech can be problematic due to accents, dialect and pronunciation," said Alan B.K. Rabinowitz, administrator of the Patient Safety Authority. "Background noise, interruptions, and unfamiliar drug names also make the problem worse. Many times the person taking the order is relying on memory to get the order right, and we've seen through our data this dramatically increases the risk of error."
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