FDA-produced TV aims to boost patient safety

Showing plus telling is the intent behind a risk-communication program designed to reduce medical errors.

By Susan J. Landers, AMNews staff. Sept. 4, 2006.

Washington -- The talking heads speaking earnestly into the camera in a television studio just beyond the Washington, D.C., beltway aren't dissecting the latest Capitol Hill happenings. This studio in Gaithersburg, Md., belongs to the Food and Drug Administration, and the co-hosts are discussing safety issues related to FDA-regulated products.

It's not "Meet the Press." It's "Patient Safety News," a show that has been running for five years and reaches thousands of viewers via satellite television and the Internet. Its target audience includes physicians and other health care professionals as well as risk managers and educators. The intent of the free service is to spread the word widely.

Safety concerns were the reason the agency began the program, said Anita Rayner, MPH, a co-host and editorial manager. The Institute of Medicine's report, "To Err is Human," had come out a few years earlier and revealed that more than 7,000 deaths annually were due to medication errors.

And the errors still seem to be occurring. A July 20 IOM report found that medication mistakes remain common at every stage, from prescribing and administering drugs to monitoring a patient's response.

After the first report, the agency decided to try communicating risk visually, Rayner said. Some stories "really screamed for [it]." This approach, she added, was particularly appropriate for explaining the FDA's recently announced campaign with the Institute for Safe Medication Practices to eliminate unsafe medical abbreviations. It's relatively easy to demonstrate on screen how abbreviations such as "U" for units, can be mistaken for an "0," a "4" or even a "cc."