When medication dispensing errors happen, they can cause serious side effects and life-altering issues for patients, and in some cases, these errors can lead to death. According to the National Institute of Health (NIH), each year in the United States, 7,000 to 9,000 people die as a result of a medication error, and hundreds of thousands of other patients experience but often do not report an adverse reaction. Medication errors can cause a lack of trust in the healthcare system generally and in healthcare providers. In addition, these errors have financial costs as well, with the NIH reporting that medication-associated errors exceed $40 billion each year.
According to a recent news report, a medication dispensing error in D.C. almost cost a 74-year-old woman her life. The patient had been recently released from the hospital and went to a rehab facility to recover from a blood clot. However, within weeks, the patient began complaining about swelling in her throat, prompting her family to look at what prescriptions the facility had given her. Her family members realized that the facility had dispensed the wrong medication, giving her drugs with someone else’s name on them. To make matters worse, the patient’s eldest daughter realized that the facility had given her a drug that her mother was severely allergic to. The patient was raced to the nearest emergency room just in time, as her throat was nearly swollen shut. She was put into a medically induced coma for more than a week.
Why Do Medication Dispensing Errors Happen?
Medication dispensing errors can occur for a variety of reasons, including human errors or issues with protocols that fail to prevent mistakes from happening. These reasons may include illegible handwriting, confusion over similarly named drugs or packaging, or errors involving dosing units, amongst many other reasons. In addition, if protocols and systems are not properly and effectively put in place to require that medical providers have a backup system to detect mistakes, then this can also lead to more pharmacy errors that could have possibly been avoided.