[ RadSafe ] Fwd: Fwd: Medical Incident

[Chris Alston]

Dr Siegel

Thanks for pointing this out; I was remiss in failing to note this
fact it in my earlier email.  As a semi-quantitative illustration, at
one hospital with which I was familiar in the 90's, the long-term
medication error rate for radiopharmaceuticals was ~ 1/16,000
administrations, all of them involving diagnostic studies. In
contrast, the  hospital's overall medication error rate was 1/8000.

Cheers
cja

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Siegel, Barry <siegelb at mir.wustl.edu>
Date: Sat, Aug 31, 2013 at 1:01 AM
IRadiopharmaceutical incidents certainly should be minimized, but the
available data actually suggest they are far less frequent than
"misadministrations" of non-radioactive drugs, which in general are
far more likely to lead to actual harm.
Barry A. Siegel, MD
Former chair, NRC Advisory Committee on Medical Uses of Isotopes (ACMUI)
siegelb at mir.wustl.edu