The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 268 No 7203 p860
22 June 2002

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The press protests too much, methinks

Health care professionals have come in for another battering from the national press and other media this week. This time they are expressing their horror over the number of incidents reported to the National Patient Safety Agency under a new pilot system.

The chief medical officer for England, and others, have done their best to downplay the figures, admitting that they are not accurate and emphasising that the system has been set up to encourage people to report incidents in trusts so that others can learn from them (see p861).

But for everyone working in the health service, the numbers probably do not come as any great surprise: it was acknowledged in the Audit Commission report "A spoonful of sugar — medicines management in NHS hospitals" published in December last year that there were too many medication errors. Between 20 and 25 per cent of "inpatient prescription charts are amended by pharmacists for a variety of reasons that reflect shortcomings in the basic rules for safe prescribing".

It ill behoves the media to affect such outrage: people working in the health service do not deliberately set out to make mistakes and harm patients. Far from it. Many of the incidents reported were not actually mistakes, but had the potential to become problematic if left unchecked. And the media must realise that health service staff often work long hours under considerable pressure to provide good care. These people need support and encouragement, not derision and vilification.

Perhaps the Press Complaints Commission should be encouraged to set up a national reporting system for errors made in newspapers and in radio and television reports. The occasional misprint and small factual error do not do much harm, but plenty of psychological damage can be done to individuals who are unfairly criticised but who cannot afford to sue for libel or defamation and whose attempts to put the record straight are either ignored or dismissed. A register of complaints might reveal more than the press might wish.

So it must be hoped that all those pharmacists working in trusts that have been involved in the National Patient Safety Agency's pilot reporting scheme are not disheartened by the tone of the criticisms they will have heard this week but accept that the scheme is the first step in creating a transparent system where mistakes can be dealt with constructively.

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