London: Hundreds of thousands of elderly patients are being wrongly prescribed drugs by their physicians, a study warned yesterday.
The pioneering research found that four in ten of those aged over 75 on medication had been affected by a medical blunder in the last year. This included being given unnecessary drugs or the wrong dose. Some were also not given crucial treatments alongside their medicine to protect against side-effects.
Researchers even discovered patients who were prescribed drugs to which they were allergic, although this was rare.
In the first study of its kind, University of Nottingham academics examined the records of 1,777 patients of all ages in 15 surgeries in England to look for errors.
Incorrect medication
They found one in 20 of the prescriptions handed out to all patients in the last year contained a mistake ranging from the minor to more serious. But the elderly, classed as the over-75s, were twice as likely to be given incorrect medication.
This is because they tend to be taking many more medications than younger age groups.
Doctors were also found to be failing to carry out proper checks to ensure that strong drugs were not causing harmful side-effects.
In some cases, patients were given the blood-thinning drug warfarin for heart disease without having regular blood tests to check they were not likely to suffer severe bleeds.
Study leader Professor Tony Amery blamed the mistakes on GPs not properly being trained to prescribe certain drugs, being distracted by patients during consultations and technical glitches on computer systems.
"GPs work under considerable time pressure with frequent distractions and interruptions," he said.
"Often prescribing is squeezed at end of a consultation. Few prescriptions were associated with significant risks to patients but it's important we do everything we can to avoid all errors."
— Daily Mail
