Swedish Hospitals 'clueless' about drug side effects - The Local

In a survey sent to 50 emergency hospitals across Sweden by Sveriges Radio (SR) investigative news programme Kaliber, only four of the 40 that answered were aware of how common the problem was among their patients.

"The absolutely first thing that needs to be done is to raise awareness about drug-related problems. It's imperative that both doctors, staff and politicians in the health care sector understand the size of this problem," said Jessica Fryckstedt, chief physician at Karolinska University Hospital (Karolinska sjukhuset) in Stockholm, to SR.

Frykstedt has studied hospital admissions caused by pharmaceuticals.

"That just goes to show that we don't know about it, that we aren't going to discover it, and that these pharmaceutical problems are going to be allowed to continue, and the patient will pay for it with suffering, hospital time, and incorrect medication," she said.

Sweden's National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) is currently working on new, stricter guidelines governing the prescribing of medications to elderly patients.

"We've looked at when a patient comes to the hospital and discovered that on the list of medications written in hospital charts there were almost two mistakes per patient, on average," Lydia Holmdal, a geriatric care specialist at Lund University Hospital.

via thelocal.se

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