Medication-Use Safety Indicators

Over the years safety of medication use has become a serious issue. For example, each year approximately 1.5 million preventable adverse events occur in the United States, costing around 3.5 billion to its economy per annum [14]. Furthermore, according to a 2002 Commonwealth Fund survey, around 11% of patients in Canada clearly reported that they were given the incorrect medication at one time or another [14], 

A number of indicators considered useful to improve medication-use safety, directly or indirectly, are presented below under six distinct categories [14]. 

Five indicators belonging to this category are as follows. 

01 = the number of prescriptions/medication orders using potentially dangerous dose abbreviations, tti = the number of all prescriptions/medication orders. 

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