Clinical research studyThe incidence of adverse drug events in two large academic long-term care facilities
Section snippets
Study setting
This study was conducted in two large academic long-term care facilities in Connecticut and Ontario, Canada. The two facilities have a total of 1229 beds. Patients residing in areas of the facilities related to short-term care (eg, subacute care, hospital-level care, or rehabilitation) were not included.
The study was conducted over an 8-month period in one facility (December 2000 through July 2001) and a 9-month period in the other facility (December 2000 through August 2001). The study was
Results
In the two study sites combined, 1247 long-term care residents (mean [± SD] age, 86 ± 8 years) yielded 8336.4 resident-months of observation time. A comparison of this sample with the overall U.S. population of nursing home residents demonstrated similar sex characteristics,14 but the study sample was somewhat older. In the United States in 1999, 72% of nursing home residents were women and 78% of all residents were aged 75 years or older, compared with 72% who were women and 92% who were 75
Discussion
We found that adverse drug events occurred frequently and were often preventable in the two academic long-term care facilities that participated in this study. Serious, life-threatening, and fatal adverse drug events were more likely to be preventable than were less severe events. Most errors associated with preventable events occurred at the prescribing and monitoring stages of pharmaceutical care.
Our study offers the opportunity to compare observed adverse drug event rates with those
Acknowledgment
We thank Mary Ellen Stansky and Jackie Cernieux, MPH, for their assistance with technical aspects of this study, and Bessie Petropoulos for assistance with manuscript preparation.
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Supported by a grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (HS010481), Rockville, Maryland.