In what is likely to come as little surprise, a U.S. study has found that patients and their families are rarely told when hospitals make mistakes with their medicines. Most medication mistakes did not harm patients, the researchers said in a report published in Critical Care Medicine, but those that did were more likely to happen in intensive care units (ICUs)—with ICU patients and their families less likely to be told about errors. "For the most part, our findings were in keeping with what the existing literature tells us about the where and how of medication errors in a hospital," said Asad Latif, the study's lead author, in an email to Reuters Health.
