Medication Errors

Children with cancer often get the wrong dose of chemotherapy or are given the drug at the wrong time, and many require treatment because of the errors, U.S. researchers said on Friday.

The problem has a lot to do with lack of common standards for delivering these life-saving, but highly toxic, drugs, said Dr. Marlene Miller, director of quality and safety at Johns Hopkins Children's Center in Baltimore.

Miller and colleagues evaluated data on medication errors collected in a national database from 1999 to 2004.

They looked at a total of 829,492 errors reported in 29,802 patients.

Of the errors, 310 involved kids on chemotherapy. Of those mistakes, 85 percent reached the patient, and nearly 16 percent of those were serious enough to require additional care.

-Medication errors common in U.S. kids with cancer