The media spotlight found its way to Dennis Quaid late last year after the actor’s newborn twins were victims of an accidental drug overdose. Mistakes such as this are all too common, according to a study released in the April issue of Pediatrics.

The study found that drug errors—medicine mix-ups, bad reactions, and accidental overdoses—harm about 1 in 15 or 540,000 hospitalized children annually. The study began in 2002 when charts for 960 children were collected from 12 children’s hospitals across the country.

Patient safety experts and researchers agreed on the need for evidence-based prevention strategies and that the problem was probably even larger than the study indicates.

Source: CNN.com