Medication Errors in the under-18s

The Guardian reports that the NPSA have published their first review on patient safety among the under-18s. At least 60,000 young adults and children suffered medical errors. The excerpt below outlines some of the things that make the administration of medication problematic:

"She said nurses had to cut, crush and dissolve adult tablets and then make a difficult calculation of the dose needed by the child according to its weight.
"The doctor prescribes in milligrams but most children are given oral medicine in millilitres," she said. "Normally, the nurse has to make the calculation."
Getting the decimal point in the right place is essential, especially where the dose units have to be converted from milligrams to micrograms. A misplaced decimal point can mean a tenfold drug overdose or underdose."

Intuitively, it seems that performing multiple complex calculations involving quite variable weights in milligrams, millilitres and micrograms is vulnerable to error. Unfortunately the NPSA's data supports this.