Omission Vs Commission

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Imagine yourself visiting a physician for your monthly checkups; your physician prescribes you a medicine for your lungs, but the pharmacist thought the written prescription is actually a medication for depression as they almost share the same spelling, making you experience headache for a week. Although this sounds unbelievable, mistaken prescription incidents can really happen right even in our best hospitals. In popular terms, we call this medical error. Although we often acknowledge medical errors can happen on physicians’ everyday life, which by the way includes nurse, pharmacist, and surgeon. It should not be treated as if it is simple medical errors that cannot avoided since according to certain Journal of Patient Safety, it currently …show more content…

Diagnostic errors, therapeutic mishaps, and wrong medication are common factors when dealing with medical errors. Diagnostic and medication errors are the most common non-operative errors, which sometimes cause from minor to major injury to patients. Ultimately, medical error could lead to death. Medical error have two forms, one is omission and commission. When we speak omission, it deals with failure of action while commission refers to wrong actions by healthcare provider. One of the most familiar omission cases is when treating psychotic patients, which sometimes lack depressive symptoms therefore doctor deem it as psychological disorder, missing depression treatment. On one hand, commission errors occurs when wrong medication is prescribe or when a wrong drug is inject to patients at the wrong time. Although omission is understandable on some cases as they often lack physical symptoms for provider to induce action but commission errors are not acceptable since they are common practice perform by healthcare professionals. Nonetheless, can we just accept that medical errors are accidental matter since we mention how healthcare providers make commission medical errors? Although it is a general perception, that medical error is unavoidable due to various factors, it is also avoidable if there is right implementation of …show more content…

As mention, latest data suggest 440,000 deaths may be occurring yearly despite the changes in 2002. Perhaps, it is the result of FDA improving their efforts to evaluate the real numbers behind medical errors. Physicians today may be more cooperative than two decades ago therefore it only shows how rampant the problem is. How then can we solve the problem

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