Hospital Authority reminds Hong Kong doctors to write out prescriptions clearly after miscommunications lead to mistakes in treatment
- Unclear prescription instructions have been blamed for two cases in which patients were administered medications they should not have received
- One patient was mistakenly given two kinds of insulin simultaneously, while another was given a blood thinner a doctor had advised withholding
Hong Kong’s Hospital Authority has reminded staff to clearly note down prescription instructions and store details accurately in record-keeping systems after two recent miscommunications led to wrong medication given to patients.
Friday’s warning came in a twice-yearly medical safety bulletin that flagged the two cases, both picked up by the authority’s Advance Incident Reporting System (AIRS), which alerts the head office to any discrepancies or issues.
Patients’ Rights Association spokesman Tim Pang Hung-cheong said the cases mentioned in the latest bulletin were alarming.
“We do not have an exact figure of such incidents, or fatal cases, but if this type of medication incident is picked up in AIRS, it is happening in frontline practice,” Pang said. “Medical professionals should be very careful with prescriptions to ensure patient safety.”
In one of the cases, medical professionals had agreed to recommend switching a diabetic outpatient’s insulin treatment from Mixtard 30 to Ryzodeg 70/30.
Both are injection treatments, but Mixtard 30 contains human insulin created through recombinant DNA technology, while Ryzodeg 70/30 contains a combination of human-made and synthetic insulin.