Unreliable clinician management of medication side effects

Wider context from the report

“1. ████████ ignored a warning alert in the medical records that his patient had suffered an adverse reaction to nitrofurantoin without checking the nature of the adverse reaction and issued a prescription for the drug regardless. 2. A letter dated 3rd November 2008 was sent by a consultant to ████████ at Castlefields Health Centre identifying that the interstitial lung disease from which 3. ████████ on commenting on alert warnings, said that most are “trivial, spurious, irrelevant or just wrong”, identified a phenomenon that he described as alert fatigue and further stated that colleagues within the practice had admitted that they “may well have done the same in my situation”. I am concerned that if ████████ comments correctly describe the attitude within his medical practice to patient safety alerts this is a matter of considerable concern and warrants investigation by you to ensure first of all that the practice has a robust system in place for posting such alerts, secondly that such alerts when posted, correctly and sufficiently identify the problem and thirdly that doctors and medical staff within the practice have full understanding and training to respond to such alerts in an appropriate manner. ”