37923 Pediatric Medication Safety

Course overview

Discussion about pediatric medication safety, including pediatric characteristics and challenges that increase the risk of medication errors, common and high-alert medications that may result in errors in the pediatric population, common medication errors that occur in pediatric populations, and strategies to decrease the risk related to pediatric errors. There is also a discussion about how implicit bias may impact healthcare. Medication errors are defined as any avoidable event in prescribing, transcribing, dispensing, administering, or monitoring, regardless of the occurrence of injury or potential injury. These events can result from human errors or system defects. Medication errors represent one of the most common causes of adverse events in pediatrics and are widely reported in the literature. Children are three times more likely to be affected by medication errors than adults with medication administration error rates reported to be over 70 percent. Despite the awareness that children are at increased risk for medication errors, little is known about the real incidence of the problem. Despite the progress achieved in recent years by pharmacological research in the pediatric population, the problem of the availability of drugs suitable for children has not yet been solved, and the percentage of drugs studied for pediatric age remains below 50 percent. Consequently, the use of adjusted adult dosage or the off-label drug administration in the pediatric population are frequent, increasing the risk of medication errors and adverse reactions.