# A prescription for death - is this stat right?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-prescription-for-death-is-this-stat-right/428552>\
**Category:** Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports\
**Created:** [December 2, 2007, 2:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-prescription-for-death-is-this-stat-right/428552 "2007-12-02T14:07:17Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![JustAnotherGeek](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/58f4c7/32.png) [@JustAnotherGeek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JustAnotherGeek)\
**Post date:** [December 2, 2007, 2:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-prescription-for-death-is-this-stat-right/428552/1 "2007-12-02T14:07:17Z")

</div>

From Friday’s article.

Either Unca Cec has to have a word with lil Ed, or there are an average of 1.4 mistakes per patient. I don’t know which one scares me more…

[

> [@Uncle Cecil on Nov 30](#):
>
> About 1,400 prescribing errors are made per every 1,000 hospital admissions (remember that a typical inpatient may receive 20-plus doses of meds daily), more than 100 of them serious.

]([http://www.straightdope.com/columns/071130.html](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/071130.html))

I see the part about the “typical inpatient may receive 20-plus doses of meds daily”, but I have to ask (not that I doubt Cecil), but really? Should I just expect that when I go in for an inpatient that I am incredibly likely to get a wrong med script? That’s truly frightening.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![DSYoungEsq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/c6cbf5/32.png) [@DSYoungEsq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSYoungEsq)\
**Post date:** [December 2, 2007, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-prescription-for-death-is-this-stat-right/428552/2 "2007-12-02T16:38:50Z")

</div>

[QUOTE=JustAnotherGeek]  
From Friday’s article.

Either Unca Cec has to have a word with lil Ed, or there are an average of 1.4 mistakes per patient. I don’t know which one scares me more…

[URL=[http://www.straightdope.com/columns/071130.html](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/071130.html)]

I see the part about the “typical inpatient may receive 20-plus doses of meds daily”, but I have to ask (not that I doubt Cecil), but really? Should I just expect that when I go in for an inpatient that I am incredibly likely to get a wrong med script? That’s truly frightening.  
[/QUOTE]

The statistic is undoubtedly correct; the usual signs of error are missing because not only does Unca Cece give an explanation for the figure (indicating that even HE would have thought wth?), but also 100 of those are SERIOUS. So about one in ten mistakes is serious, not an unsurprising stat in itself, and, thus, making the number 1400 consistent.

Remember, an admission can last a long time, and a patient can get many doses a day, so an admission might have something like 400 + doses over a 20 day hospital stay. Let’s say that the error rate on that is 1%. Then, that “admission” got 4 prescribing errors. Now that is a ratio of 4 to 1, but not as scary as saying that every patient is regularly getting prescribing errors.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![outlierrn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/outlierrn/32/3005_2.png) [@outlierrn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/outlierrn)\
**Post date:** [December 9, 2007, 4:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-prescription-for-death-is-this-stat-right/428552/3 "2007-12-09T04:06:13Z")

</div>

Any attempt to conflate all inpatient treatment to an average number of doses, and call some errors “serious” without regard to context, is bound to give you some scary numbers.