Capt. Rick Becker, right, commanding officer of U.S. Naval Hospital Okinawa, presents the 2004 Department of Defense Safety Award for Technology to Lt. Cmdr. Thinh Ha, department head for the hospital’s Pharmacy Services, during a short ceremony Tuesday. (Fred Zimmerman / S&S)
CAMP LESTER, Okinawa — The U.S. Naval Hospital Okinawa pharmacy department recently received a Department of Defense safety award for the work they’ve done to prevent overmedication of children.
The department received the 2004 DOD Patient Safety Award for Technology from Capt. Rick Becker, commanding officer of the hospital. Becker received the award during a Tricare conference in Washington, D.C., in January, but the award wasn’t given to the department until this week, which is appropriate as March 6-12 is National Patient Safety Week.
The pharmacy department was chosen for the award for its “Maximum Daily Dose Project.”
When Lt. Cmdr. Thinh Ha, pharmacy department head, first took over the section, he noticed the hospital could utilize its Composite Health Care System (CHCS), the computer program used by the hospital, to improve pediatrics department safety. The pharmacy staff calculated the average weight for children up to 12 years old and then matched the weights with the maximum daily dose recommended for each weight dosage medicine they carried. The staff then found a way to use the CHCS to warn physicians if they were over-prescribing a particular medication.
“There was an opportunity to improve our pharmacy services and patient safety,” Ha said. “The system was already there, we just had to modify it and make it work.”
The project wasn’t an overnight success, Ha said. The staff began working on it in February 2003 and completed the task in August 2004.
“A lot of our pharmacy staff expertise was involved in making it work for Okinawa,” said Lt. Hollie Cook, a pharmacist at the hospital.
Since implementing the system, more than 30 “significant” overdosed prescriptions for pediatric patients have been “caught.” Cook said that if those errors weren’t caught, it could have resulted in patient hospitalization. She said most times, over-medication is simply the result of a wrong keystroke on the keyboard. For example, she said teaspoon could be typed instead of milliliter, causing an inadvertent overdose.
Even if a wrong dosage does slip through the computer, Ha said, the error is typically caught in the pharmacy. He said when pharmacy technicians hand out filled prescriptions, they do the math by hand to double check.
“Patients are going to go home with the right dosage,” he said.
The hospital and branch clinic pharmacies combined dispense more than 1,600 pediatric weight dose prescriptions each month, Ha said.
While Ha may have come up with the safety idea, he said it wouldn’t have been possible without the entire pharmacy team.
“The people who made this successful are the technicians who work on the front line daily,” he said. “They took the time to document interventions, and without their time, we wouldn’t have had any data.”
Cook added, “We just saw this as a project to improve patient safety.”
