It is perhaps unsurprising that a higher rate of medication error attaches to emergency rooms than the rate that exists in more generalized hospital settings, given the chaos, unpredictability, constant multi-tasking and generally frenetic environment that characterizes many ER departments.

It would thus seem logical that employing temporary workers in an ER setting would be a least-favored practice and something to be avoided, since even practiced workers familiar with the pace and physical surroundings of a particular emergency room still face a formidable challenge on a regular basis. Unfamiliarity with process, personnel and the standard way of doing things in a specific facility would only seem to magnify the potential for medical error and exacerbate an already existing problem.

A newly published study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine indicates that this indeed seems to be the case when temporary workers are introduced in emergency room settings. The result, according to study authors who examined more than 20,000 ER medication errors in nearly 600 hospitals from 2000-2005, is that more mistakes occur that are likely to affect patients. And when they do, the probability increases for both temporary harm and life-threatening injuries.

The researchers say that persons who consider the study shouldn't be too quick to simply point the finger at the temporary workers, adjudging them to be less proficient or skilled. Lead study author Dr. Julius Cuong Pham says, rather, that facilities that employ comparatively high numbers of temporary staff often have more quality control issues generally.

"It may not be the temporary staff that causes those errors, but a function of the whole system," Pham says.

This is a sobering and growing concern, say the researchers, because hiring temporary staff is on the definite upswing in facilities across the country, owing to reduced costs that employees realize by not having to provide those workers with benefits.

Related Resource: UPI, "Temp workers linked to more medical error" Aug. 27, 2011