Quote:
Originally Posted by LCF
The question is, is the low cost worth these 0,0x % of people who will get damaged/killed by the system? For the 99,9(10-x) % probably.
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Googling a bit to try to put numbers on those percentages...
"According to Wolters Kluwer Pharma Solutions, U.S. outpatient pharmacies filled 3.9 billion prescriptions in 2009. Of those, 325,000 were serious enough to cause potential harm to patients due to the fact they were filled incorrectly with the wrong drug."
So, on the one hand, 325,000 sounds like (and is) a pretty big number, it is also 0.008%, or one in 12,000, so 99.992% of them are either correct or not "serious enough to cause potential harm to patients." Put another way, somewhere in the US an average of 890 times a day, someone is given the wrong medication that has the potential to cause them harm. (Wherther you want to think in the "very small percentage" or the "thousands of times a day" mindset depends, I suppose, on if you are the "glass half empty" or "glass half full" type.)
Total number of annual mistakes (including both the deadly ones and the less serious) is around 5 million per year-- one out of every 780 perscriptions or 0.12%. Or-- around 13,700 times per day somewhere in the US someone is getting the wrong medication-- roughly once every 6 seconds.
Numbers taken from here:
http://www.accessrx.com/blog/current...ause-problems/