Medication errors with vaccines can harm individual patients, but when they also undermine trust in public health programmes, serious problems can ripple across entire communities – as the Samoan healthcare crisis of 2018 dramatically showed. The Institute for Safe Medication Practices offers straightforward advice that could prevent those errors from happening again.

This episode is part of the Uppsala Reports Long Reads series – the most topical stories from UMC’s pharmacovigilance magazine, brought to you in audio format. Find the original article here.

Tune in to find out:

• Which errors can occur in the vaccination process
• Why two-component vaccines are especially susceptible to administration errors
• How vaccine packaging and labelling can be improved to prevent errors

Want to know more?

The Institute for Safe Medication Practices has repeatedly warned about the risks with two-component vaccines. In 2015, they issued a position statement calling for safer design of vaccine packaging and labelling.

Tragic errors can occur when dangerous substances are accidentally used instead of the vaccine diluent, like the incident that occurred in Syria in 2014.

The measles outbreak that took root in Samoa as a consequence of vaccine hesitancy – which in turn stemmed from an earlier, tragic vaccination error – holds important lessons for the rest of the world.

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