Economic Burden of Adverse Drug Reactions in a Tertiary Hospital

Adverse drug reactions are a leading source of avoidable harm in hospital medicine, and they carry costs that rarely appear as a single line in a hospital budget. This short communication is a narrative review that reports no new data. It summarises published evidence on how often adverse reactions cause admission or arise during stay, how their costs are classified and measured, what proportion is preventable, and how costing methods influence the figures. Studies agree that reactions prolong admissions and add substantial expenditure, while estimates differ widely because of definitions, case finding and cost components. Hospitals seeking to use such figures should recognise these limits and build local, transparent costing before relying on borrowed estimates.