Each year in North America, tens of thousands of hospital patients experience the adverse effects of being administered the wrong drugs, or the wrong concentration of drugs. Regardless of how conscientious and highly trained health care professionals are, human error is nearly always the major factor in these incidents. At Toronto General Hospital, the risk of medication error in the operating rooms is being tackled with a cutting-edge barcode-driven safety process.

Co-developers Esther Fung, Manager of Pharmacy, and Dr. Ludwik Fedorko MD, PhD hope that the new process will help to expand the practice of bar coding by manufacturers here in Canada, and save lives in the process. The technology, which Ms. Fung and Dr. Fedorko believe is a significant improvement over existing methods, is already being viewed with some interest by hospitals south of the border, where drug bar coding is mandatory on unit-of-use labels by FDA. In Canada, Pharmaceutical Partners of Canada is one of only two pharmaceutical companies with a complete product line of bar-coding. Despite these challenges, Ms. Fung and Dr. Fedorko say the need is great for an operating room safety process such as this to help eliminate potential human error.