The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 276 No 7387 p156
11 February 2006

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News summary

Anticoagulant risk assessment published

A risk assessment for anticoagulant therapy has been published by the National Patient Safety Agency. It provides the detailed background evidence for safer practice recommendations that will be made later this year.

Covering oral and injectable anticoagulants, it reviews incident reports and the published literature and risks and potential solutions. It also contains a report of a workshop held with patients, which offers insight into patients’ feelings about the way that services are run. One participant said that medical consultants often did not understand the drugs he was using, even when the doctors were offered explanations. As an example, there had been a lack of recognition that phenindione was an anticoagulant, confusing it with phenytoin: “You tell them and their eyes go blank,” the patient said.

The report entitled, “Risk assessment of anticoagulant therapy”, is available as a PDF file (270K).