Each year, thousands of patients are receiving drugs that they are known to be allergic to and, although the reactions are often too mild to notice, this puts them in "serious risk of harm."
According to the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence, or NICE, over 62,000 people visit the emergency room every year to receive treatment for an adverse drug reaction. They say that patients will often experience mild reactions to commonly prescribed drugs such as painkillers and antibiotics. However, there have also been instances when these allergic reactions have become extremely dangerous and life threatening. Based on the analysis of Data for patient safety from the year 2005 up to 2013, researchers were able to identify over 18,000 incidents of drug allergies, including six fatal cases. The majority of these cases involved that dispensing of a drug to patients with previously known allergies.
Drug watchdogs from NICE said that they had identified "major issues" with how these drug allergies were being documented and warned that the dissemination of information was not enough among healthcare professionals, and even more so with patients. This is one of the main causes of why a doctor, or other healthcare professional, is able to give a patient a drug that triggers an allergic reaction. This scenario has prompted the NICE to create new guidelines instructing Health professionals to be more careful and more accurate when documenting drug allergies on patient health records. The new guidelines also included directives on how prescriptions have to be "redesigned" so that it includes drug allergy information.
Dr. Shuaid Nasser is the lead author of the new guidelines and is a consultant allergist from Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge. He also suggested that doctors might want to look into conducting more tests that would confirm or rule out drug allergies in patients.
