U.S. Food and Drug Administration
FDA Consumer magazine
January-February 2001
Table of Contents

Letters to the Editor

Medical Errors

Medical errors are errors we would all like to avoid-health-care practitioners and consumers alike ("Make No Mistake: Medical Errors Can Be Deadly Serious," September-October 2000 FDA Consumer). But do you know that there is a dedicated group of professionals whose life work it is to protect the consumer from error-prone or negligent health-care providers? Certified credentialing professionals are valued members of the health-care team and work in most managed care plans, many IPAs, group practices, and hospitals. We write certification exams and participate in ongoing education to retain our certification. What are we paid to do? We are paid to snoop. We are trained where to look, what resources to use, and how to document our findings. Both the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations and the National Committee for Quality Assurance require that our services be utilized by any health-care facility desiring certification. Visit the Web site of the National Association of Medical Staff Services (www.namss.org) or contact your state association to learn more.

My wife was ill [recently] and lost three days of skiing because our pharmacy gave us the wrong medicine. They misread the writing and did not check with the medical doctor who wrote it. Whitney A. Brown's letter to you (November-December 2000 FDA Consumer) suggested the use of numbers. A world-wide adopted system of numbers for all the medicines and chemicals is in use and available. A system of naming new drug entities is also in place once the entity has been published in a journal which is reviewed by The Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS). They are called Chemistry Abstract Registry Numbers. The US Pharmacopeia publishes the USAN (United States Approved Names) and Dictionary of Approved Names and uses this system already. If physicians somehow can place numbers on the prescription more accurately (like sticky labels) than writing the names of medicines, the drug-related errors may be reduced. As an aside, I have read the FDA Consumer for 30 years for my own education. No one else tells me the difficult health questions as well as you do.

Dr. Benson, now retired, was formerly director of FDA's Division of Drug Chemistry.

Insulin Pump User Support

You might want to refer your readers to this resource: www.insulin-pumpers.org ("Overcoming Juvenile Diabetes With a Little Planning And High-Tech Tools," July-August 2000 FDA Consumer). The Insulin Pumpers Web site and mail list is the largest support forum in the world for the users of insulin pumps. Its members include many doctors, certified diabetes educators, RNs, over 300 pumping kids ages 13 months through teens (or their parents), and more than 2,400 adult pumpers.

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