TUESDAY, Aug. 30 (HealthDay News) — The use of temporary
emergency department doctors and nurses poses an increased safety risk to
patients, according to a new study.
Johns Hopkins researchers analyzed data on nearly 24,000 medication
errors that occurred in emergency departments at 592 hospitals across the
United States between 2000 and 2005, and found that temporary staff were
twice as likely as permanent staff to be involved in medication errors
that harmed patients.
The increased risk of medication errors associated with temporary staff
may be due to their unfamiliarity with a hospital’s practices and systems,
the researchers suggested.
“You may know the medicine, but you still may get tripped up by the
policies and procedures of an unfamiliar system. This can lead to more
serious errors,” study leader Dr. Julius Cuong Pham, an assistant
professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine and emergency
medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said
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