Swiss medical weekly
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Swiss medical weekly · Nov 2004
Adverse drug events caused by medication errors in medical inpatients.
In view of growing concern in recent years regarding medication errors as causes of adverse drug events (ADEs), we explore the frequency and characteristics of error-associated ADEs in medical inpatients. ⋯ Incident eADEs were observed in 1 out of 250 patients and accounted for approximately 6% of ADEs. In contrast, eADEs accounted for 30% of ADE-related hospital admissions. Hence, in medical inpatients, eADEs represented a small fraction of total incident ADEs, whereas they contributed significantly to hospital admissions.