QUEENSLANDERS should feel reassured that a potentially deadly issue with medication software in the state’s hospitals was detected by health authorities, the premier says.
A RISK report into the Metavision Intensive Care program, which is used to control medication levels for some of the state’s sickest patients, identified a 60 to 90 per cent likelihood of a patient dying within the next month, if the problem with the software hadn’t been detected.
But the same software was being used in about 100 hospitals globally, premier Campbell Newman said on Monday. “The thing that I take comfort from is that the issue that has been detected was detected by the clinical people of Queensland Health,” he said. “So they’ve moved quickly to report this issue, to make sure that patients were protected, and to ensure that there will be a fix to this system which is being used by other hospitals around the globe.” Mr Newman denied the incident showed the software should have been more thoroughly tested before implementation. “I think it was fair to assume that it had been through all the rigour because it had been used for some time,” he said. Queensland Health has reverted to manual systems to check medication levels since the problem was identified. Health Minister Lawrence Springborg said he was not aware of any cases in which the software problem had contributed to a patient death.