Patient-controlled analgesia / a representative from Abbott Laboratories Inc. responds

Recently, the Institute for Safe Medication Practices reported that a patient had received a lethal morphine overdose while connected to the Abbott Lifecare 4100 PCA Plus II machine.1 This machine is easily misprogrammed by caregivers, who must manually enter the PCA parameters, and it needs a more sensible and forgiving user interface.2 A number of patients have received opiate overdoses as a result of PCA errors: insertion of a 5 mg/mL morphine cartridge when the machine is expecting a 1 mg/mL concentration, or acceptance of the default (initial) drug concentration when the correct action is to scroll up to the correct value, among other errors.3,4