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…
The Delaware Secretary of State’s Office has suspended the Controlled Substance Registrations of two medical doctors and a nurse practitioner because of allegations that they overprescribed a number of controlled substances in unreasonable and excessive amounts. Complaints filed against the the three, who all worked in the pain management field,…
For people over the age of 65, two-thirds of emergency room visits result from side effects of medications in two broad categories, according to the Boston Globe and the New England Journal of Medicine. The categories are medications used to treat heart disease and those taken for diabetes. The study…
The family of a south Florida man has filed a lawsuit against North Shore Medical Center in Miami. The man, 79 year-old Richard Smith, died in July 2010 when he went to the hospital complaining of shortness of breath and received the wrong medication. The nurse who administered the allegedly…