Dundee-based politician Shona Robison, SNP spokeswoman for health in the Scottish Parliament, is calling on the health department to look at “what lies behind the figures”.

She discovered there had been a 50% rise across Scotland in admissions to hospital due to adverse drug reactions, excluding abuse of illegal drugs, with figures increasing from 4123 to 6156.

Information on deaths and admissions to hospital were included in a number of written answers from the Executive.

Ms Robison said she was particularly interested in NHS Tayside’s Patient Safety Initiative, launched 18 months ago that is already claiming success in reducing the number of adverse incidents. She wants to make sure lessons learned in one area are shared across the country.

“I am particularly interested in NHS Tayside’s Patient Safety Initiative where they looked at making changes around how drugs are administered, ensuring they are minimising the risk of wrong dosage and wrong site,” said Ms Robison.

“A lot of problems arise from drugs being administered in the NHS with human error, either being given in the wrong place on the body or in the wrong amounts.

“The Patient Safety Initiative is looking at a whole range of issues, but administering drugs was one of them.”

Earlier this year Professor Peter Davey, a consultant physician at Ninewells Hospital, presented an improvement plan for medicines safety to health bosses on an NHS Tayside committee.

He outlined the ways medicine mistakes could occur, highlighting doctors’ illegible handwriting leading to the wrong dose and sometimes the wrong drug being administered. He also called on drug companies to make changes to packaging, pointing out corporate “branding” led to very different drugs being placed in similar packages, making it easy for those dispensing drugs to make mistakes.

Speaking today NHS Tayside’s head of risk management Pat O’Connor said the target Tayside was given by the international institute overseeing the initiative was to “get errors down to less than 10%”. That target had been reached in 18 months.

Mrs O’Connor stressed adverse drug events were not side effects that are common when taking drugs. Adverse drug incidents were “unexpected consequences” caused by errors.

She said new systems had been introduced to help reduce the risk of adverse drug incidents. One of these was keeping up-to-date records in hospital of all the medication a patient was taking whether it was prescribed by a hospital doctor or a GP.

“We know when people come in to hospital they don’t actually have with them all the drugs they are taking,” said Mrs O’Connor.

“So what we are doing is taking a medication history and creating a process so that process follows the patient through. There is always a current list of their medication. We have never had that before.”

She said the initiative was not simply looking at actual harm to patients but was trying to build in “preventability” to hospital systems and stop errors occurring.