Medication errors are killing more people than heart attacks or cancer, according to new research.

Pharmacist Ken Lee is lobbying for more communication between doctors and pharmacies after his research found one in three prescriptions featured mistakes.

Mr Lee this week released his book, How Safe is Your Prescription, at the Australian Pharmacy Professional Conference on the Gold Coast.

His study found about 190,000 hospital admissions a year are related to medicines and their side effects while the inappropriate use of medicine costs Australia about $600 million a year.

Mr Lee studied 21,733 consultations in Australian community pharmacies between August 2008 and July 2009 using the Chemconsult prescription safety check system.

He said errors could easily be avoided if patients talked to their pharmacist about the uses of their prescribed medicine.

And Mr Lee blamed dosing errors, allergic responses and drug interactions as other common mistakes.

Mr Lee’s research comes as Australian data on medication errors and adverse drug events suggests up to 3 percent of all hospital admissions are related to problems with medicines and, of those, 43 percent are potentially preventable.

Australian Incident Monitoring System figures show 10 percent of medication incidents occur as a result of dispensing errors.

Pharmacists have reported that two of the most common types of dispensing errors are selecting the incorrect strength and selecting the incorrect product, with major contributing factors being ‘look alike’ or ‘sound alike’ errors, high prescription volume and interruptions.