Medication error is "any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm while the medication is in the control of the health care professional, patient, or consumer," according to the National Coordinating Council for Medication Error Reporting and Prevention. Serious medication errors occur over One Million times each year. Twenty per cent are life threatening. Each prescription mistake adds $2,000 to the cost of hospitalization according to one study resulting in 2 billion dollars annual increase in hospital costs. Administering the wrong dosage or improper combinations can cause interactions or contraindications with fatal results. 1.3 Million patients are victims of medicine injuries.

Most-Common Medication Mistakes:

The American Hospital Association lists these as some common types of prescription or medication errors:

• incomplete patient information (not knowing about patients' allergies, other medicines they are taking, previous diagnoses, and lab results, for example);
  
  
• unavailable drug information (such as lack of up-to-date warnings);
  
  
• miscommunication of drug orders which can involve poor handwriting, confusion between drugs with similar names, misuse of zeroes and decimal points, confusion of metric and other dosing units, and inappropriate abbreviations;
  
  
• lack of appropriate drug labeling as a drug is prepared and repackaged into smaller units; environmental factors, such as lighting, heat, noise, and interruptions, that can distract health professionals from their medical tasks.

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