The family of a five-year old boy in the Chicago area is claiming that a case of mistaken identity resulted in the boy receiving the wrong medication and suffering a near-fatal reaction with possible long-term health effects. They have filed a negligence lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court seeking $50,000…
A hospital in Houston, Texas has adopted a “narrative-based approach” of communicating the details of medication errors to hospital staff (login required). A medication safety consultant employed by the hospital found that the prior approach, which relied on unit managers to pass along information to their teams, was not leading…
The parents of an infant allege that a California hospital is responsible for injuries that required their child to go on life support. Hospital staff reportedly administered far more than the prescribed dosage of medication while treating the child for meningitis. Doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other medical professionals have a…
In order to recover damages for injuries caused by a pharmacy error, a plaintiff must prove that the defendant breached a duty of care that it owed to the injured person. A state appellate court ruled that the husband of a nursing home patient who died due to a medication…
A pharmacist may offer expert testimony in a wrongful death lawsuit regarding a physician’s alleged failure to obtain a patient’s informed consent, according to a ruling by the Maryland Court of Special Appeals. Fusco v. Shannon, 63 A.3d 145 (Md. Spec. App. 2013). The trial court excluded testimony from the…
Confusion between two similarly-named drugs can be harmful or even fatal if the error is not detected quickly. An error could result from any number of circumstances, such as a pharmacist who misreads a doctor’s handwriting or a nurse who accidentally administers the wrong drug. The U.S. Food and Drug…
A federal court dismissed most of the causes of action in a lawsuit alleging that a generic antibiotic caused a dangerous, potentially-fatal reaction. Wilson v. Amneal Pharmaceuticals, LLC, No. 1:13-cv-00333, order (D. Id., Dec. 31, 2013). The lawsuit asserted claims under Idaho state law, but the decision is similar to…
A federal employment termination lawsuit against a major corporation had the unintended consequence of revealing a potentially unlawful scheme of illegally operated pharmacies. Please note, however, that just because a former employee made allegations in his complaint doesn’t necessarily mean that they are true. Individuals can allege anything they want…
Hospital pharmacies, as opposed to retail pharmacies, present unique challenges that can lead to mistakes being made. Those include a much larger amount of patients being served at any given time, more complicated health issues or treatments, different doctors providing coordinated care, and the different medical professionals’ habits in writing…
A California man and his wife recently filed a lawsuit against the drug maker Genentech, a compounding pharmacy, and the doctors responsible for injecting contaminated medicine into his eye that caused him to become blind. The lawsuit makes several different sorts of arguments regarding culpability of the various defendants for…