A new study has revealed the most common OR error. The first-ever research for measuring medical errors in the perioperative period (immediately before, during and after a surgical procedure) has discovered that in every other operation a mistake is made.

During the researcher, over 275 procedures undertaken at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) were analyzed by the paper’s researchers. They discovered that a third of the errors resulted in patients being harmed.

They found that the most common mistakes made were wrong dosages being administered, symptoms indicated by vital signs of a patient going without untreated and medication labeling mistakes.

Among the severe drug events that may have result into patients being harmed, 30% were deemed major, 69% serious and less than 2% were considered to be fatal. Procedures that take long time like the one that last over six hours had a higher rate of later problems.

Lead author of the paper, Karen C Nanji, said, “We definitely have room for improvement in preventing perioperative medication errors, and now that we understand the types of errors that are being made and their frequencies, we can begin to develop targeted strategies to prevent them”.

Karen C Nanji said that considering the fact that MGH is a national leader in patient safety and had already taken a lot of efforts and has implemented many strategies to improve safety in the operating room, perioperative medication error rates are perhaps at least as high at a number of other hospitals.