Medication errors cost the NHS over £90M since 2019, yet most go unreported. Tackling this requires better reporting culture and smarter, proactive prescribing systems to prevent harm - and this article delves into the costs and how to reduce them with technology.
In the last few weeks, Kent Online published an article highlighting the cost of negligence claims relating to medication errors at East Kent Hospitals. They totalled more than £4.5M over five years and point to a much wider, systemic issue within the NHS - much of which has been illustrated in many subsequent articles highlighting the cost of claims in trusts up and down the country.
Nationally, medication errors have cost NHS trusts in England more than £90 million in compensation and legal fees since 2019. Between 2019 and 2024, there were 1,129 claims - 68% of which resulted in damages being paid.
But these figures represent only the tip of the iceberg.
The costs of additional treatments, extended hospital stays, and further appointments all add up - as do the inefficiencies created by mistakes.
And then there’s the human cost: pain, stress, longer recovery times, and the emotional toll mistakes can take on both patients and staff.
Whether it’s the wrong dose, the wrong route, or the wrong drug altogether, the consequences of prescribing errors are often missed - and even when they are spotted, they’re rarely reported.
We know that around 10% of prescriptions contain an error, and estimates suggest there are 237 million medication errors in the NHS each year. Yet studies suggest that just 3.2 in every 1,000 of these are formally reported. That’s a tiny proportion.
And while most recorded errors may be judged as not clinically significant, that doesn’t mean they come without cost. Harm can be subtle, cumulative, or displaced elsewhere in the system - and when the majority of errors go unreported, the true scale and impact remain hidden.
Recent headlines tell a sobering story. We've heard about children suffering after being given a fraction of the right post-op pain relief, a patient sadly dying after not being prescribed the right heart medication, and a baby in critical care after being given ten times the safe dose of a common painkiller.
We don’t yet know the full details of these cases, but it's not difficult to see how they might have happened. With three-quarters of NHS staff burnt out or exhausted, manual ways of calculating dosages commonplace, and electronic systems not fit-for-purpose, it's easy to see how errors happen - and to understand how many of them could be preventable.
The cost of prescribing errors goes far beyond what’s evident in legal payouts or incident reports.They bring both visible and invisible costs to patients, families, and the NHS.
If we dig below the surface of the story of litigation, a bigger picture is revealed:
And for every visible prescribing error that causes obvious harm or makes the news, many others lurk beneath the surface, draining resources, eroding trust, and compromising care.
There’s no single fix. But the first step is recognition: we need to accept and acknowledge just how many errors go undetected or unreported - and how deeply they affect outcomes, operations, and lives. At the moment, many errors are caught and corrected by “human backstops” of nurses, pharmacists, and other staff diligently manually checking prescriptions - and in these instances are not usually reported. This further hides the scale of the problem, including the burden felt by the staff responsible for catching mistakes before harm is done.
Only then, can we effectively address their true cost and implement ways of preventing them
Improving reporting must come next - staff need to work within a culture where they feel able to flag mistakes without fear - so we can build a truer picture of what’s really happening.
The final part is introducing new systems that break the reliance on staff to catch mistakes at the last minute. Right now, current systems are often adding in friction - leaving staff to function as the final safeguard.
In a huge system like the NHS where almost half of all adults are on prescription medication, errors during the prescribing process are inevitable to some extent. But many prescribing errors are preventable.
Tackling them means moving beyond outdated systems to a proactive, intelligent approach that supports clinical decision-making in real time.
We need to stop treating prescribing errors as isolated events - and start treating them as system failures we can fix.
