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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) Oct 07 - One in 10 children who are treated in the emergency department (ED) may get the wrong dose of medicine or be given medication at the incorrect frequency, new study findings suggest.

Children seen between 4 AM and 8 AM, children with severe disease and those seen on weekends were between 1.5 and 2.5 times more likely to experience a medication prescribing error than others, lead author Dr. Eran Kozer, from the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, and colleagues note.

In their paper in the October issue of Pediatrics, Dr. Kozer and colleagues note that between 44,000 and 98,000 people die each year in the US as a result of medical errors. And prescribing errors, they note, occur most frequently in pediatric patients and EDs.

Dr. Kozer's team reviewed the medical records of 1532 children treated in the ED of a pediatric hospital. Two pediatricians independently decided whether a medication error had occurred and gave errors a numerical severity score.

"Prescribing errors were identified in 10.1% of the charts," the researchers report.

"The most common types of prescribing errors were dosing errors, followed by drugs given with incorrect frequency," they add.

Drugs most commonly implicated in prescribing errors included acetaminophen, antibiotics, asthma medications and antihistamines.

"Our findings suggest that errors are more common among seriously ill patients and that trainees are more likely to make medical errors, particularly at the beginning of the academic year," the authors write.

"Future research should focus on the development and evaluation of strategies to reduce medication errors in the pediatric emergency department," they conclude.

Pediatrics 2002;110:737-742.

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