Children who should have received chewable fluoride tablets may instead have received Tamoxifen, a drug used to treat breast cancer, from a CVS Pharmacy in Chatham, New Jersey. Up to fifty families, according to initial reports, may have been affected by the error, in which the pharmacy dispensed the wrong…
Shortages of certain prescription medications are nothing new to most pharmacists, hospitals, and doctors. According to the American Hospital Association, nearly 99.5 percent of U.S. hospitals reported some drug shortages in the first half of 2011, with 44 percent experiencing shortages of more than twenty drugs and 78 percent rationing…
A grand jury in Kern County, California recently asked an emergency juvenile shelter to report on how its staff handles prescription and over-the-counter medications for children that are sheltered there. It also called on the county’s Department of Human Services to make a registered nurse available at the shelter 24…
The Philadelphia School District laid off 141 employees at the end of 2011, including forty-seven school nurses. Schools across the country, facing budget shortfalls, are turning to layoffs. Many schools now have no full-time nurses, relying instead on other staff, including coaches and teacher’s aides, to dispense medications to students…
The hospital pharmacy services director at Minnesota’s Hennepin County Medical Center, Bruce Thompson, noticed several years ago that his staff would often discover medication errors when patients returned to the hospital after treatment. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune recounted the story of a patient who left the hospital after a kidney transplant…
A jury in Miami awarded $12.6 million to Shaniah Rolle, a teenager who had to have all four limbs amputated because of a vaccination error thirteen years ago. After a five-week trial, the jury deliberated for three days before reaching a verdict. Rolle will not recover the full amount of…
Online pharmacies have become increasingly common as an alternative to brick and mortar drugstores, offering possible cost savings and saving consumers one or more errands. Many major drugstore chains now offer online ordering in addition to their in-store services. A number of companies have set up exclusively web-based services as…
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an alert to pharmacists nationwide on December 28, 2011 regarding two drugs with similar-sounding names but very different uses, warning them of the risk of serious injury if one drug is accidentally substituted for the other. Durezol is an FDA-approved eye medicine…
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a memorandum in late December laying out guidelines for the use of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, by pharmaceutical companies in marketing their products. The memo’s release came more than two years after the FDA held hearings on the matter…
A panel at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommended that the labels for certain popular birth control pills, including the pill marketed as Yaz, should be updated to include new data that suggest an elevated risk of blood clots. The affected drugs are manufactured by Bayer. A panel…