Medicines Safety in Anaesthetic Practice

Question 1

Anaesthetic medication errors exclude issues relating to supply of medicines T/F

Answer 1

False. They can occur at any stage in the medicines management process.

Question 2

Medicine management encompasses the processes from medication selection through to therapeutic monitoring T/F

Answer 2

True

Question 3

Mis-selection of a syringe from a tray of drugs is an example of modal classification

Answer 3

True

Question 4

Psychological theory focuses on describing the events that occur

Answer 4

False. It focuses on explaining the underlying reasons for the error rather than merely describing events.

Question 5

Classification of errors is not useful in clinical practice T/F

Answer 5

False. Liberal error reporting and analysis allows trends in errors to be detected which is important to enable patient safety improvements

Question 6

There is a 100-fold discrepancy in the incidence of medication errors depending on the methodology in clinical trials T/F

Answer 6

True. This may represent that errors are commonly unnoticed.

Question 7

One third of anaesthetic medication errors lead to an observed adverse event T/F

Answer 7

True

Question 8

Life-threatening medication errors have been found to occur in up to 1 in every 1000 anaesthetics T/F

Answer 8

False. They have been found to occur in 1% of cases.

Question 9

Common medication errors include wrong route, failure to dilute, administering a known allergic drug, and failure to flush a line after a drug T/F

Answer 9

False. These are examples of lethal errors which are less frequent. The commonest errors are labelling errors, wrong dose, omissions and documentation errors.

Question 10

Medication errors in critical care are independently associated with an increased mortality T/F

Answer 10

True. While there is no rigorous data on the impact of common anaesthetic medication errors, there is data to demonstrate significant harm in critical care.