BMJ 2001;322:548 ( 3 March )

Letters

Not again!

    Designing safer medical devices requires financial and political support
    Erroneous intrathecal injection results from a problem with protocols
    National guidelines are urgently needed
    Only ocular treatments should be packaged like eye drops . . .
    . . . and packaging of lignocaine must be changed
    Patients must be properly informed to agree to or decline treatment

Designing safer medical devices requires financial and political support

See pp 501, 517, 562, 563

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITORBerwick emphasises the need to redesign medical devices to help avoid errors.¹ In the European Union a task group from the European Standards Organisation (CEN) reported on ways to reduce the incidents of accidental misconnection of lines to patients.² It identified a need to differentiate between connectors used in lines and syringes for enteral feeding, vascular access, and administering and sampling gases in the respiratory system, including a risk analysis of the results of misconnection.

The report was not welcomed by EUCOMED, which represents several European medical device manufacturers, because its proposals create more hazards for users and increase costs in a highly competitive sector of the medical device industry with high volume, low cost products. The Japanese government changed the design of connectors on syringes and enteral feed systems in less than a year because of an associated death, but none of the standards bodies in the . . . [Full text of this article]

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• Lawton, R, Gardner, P, Green, B, Davey, C, Chamberlain, P, Phillips, P, Hughes, G (2009). An engineered solution to the maladministration of spinal injections. Qual Saf Health Care 18: 492-495 [Abstract] [Full text]  
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