Pharmacy Error Injury Lawyer Blog

Five Ways Pharmacists Can Help Prevent Pharmacy Errors

September 22, 2017 | Lebowitz & Mzhen

Tens of thousands of patients are provided the wrong medication, wrong dose, or wrong instructions in their prescriptions each year. These Maryland pharmacy errors can range in seriousness. On one end of the spectrum are the errors that are caught by the patient before any medication is ingested. While these errors present no risk of injury, they are still alarming.

More serious prescription errors are those that result in serious injuries or death. While there are tens of thousands of documented errors each year, approximately 7,000 of these errors are fatal. Over the past decade, the pharmacy industry has been the focus of many studies looking at how to decrease the cases of serious and fatal errors. A recent report discusses five of the most common recommendations for pharmacists to take that will decrease their error rates.

Provide enough pharmacists – One of the leading causes of pharmacy errors is that the pharmacist filling the prescription is overworked. By ensuring that there are enough pharmacist staff members on duty, pharmacies are able to keep workloads manageable and provide much-needed breaks to pharmacists.

The Risks of Pharmacy Compounding Errors in Hospitals May Be Under-Appreciated

September 15, 2017 | Lebowitz & Mzhen

Maryland pharmacy errors are shockingly common and have several causes. One cause that is rarely discussed is compounding errors involving intravenous (IV) medication. The use of IV medication is very common is hospitals. Normally, a nurse comes into a patient’s room with a small bag of fluid, connects the bag to the IV in the patient’s arm, and hangs the bag up near the patient’s bed. However, patients are only seeing a small part of what goes into preparing this medication.

In reality, there are many steps that must be taken before that bag of liquid is administered to a hospital patient. According to a recent industry news source, there are a number of ways that an error can occur when a pharmacist prepares IV medication. For example, the pharmacists in the hospital’s compounding center are rarely required to conform to the same protocol, resulting in each pharmacist having their own system for creating compound medications. In a busy pharmacy environment, this can result in a pharmacist overlooking a crucial step or making some other kind of hasty error.

Of course, when dealing with serious medications, the measurements must be precise. However, too often, pharmacists are essentially “eyeballing” the correct amount of medication by using small black measurement lines on the side of a syringe. In addition, much of the process relies on hand-written notes that can be misinterpreted, resulting in an increased chance of an error.

New Report Indicates Pharmacy Errors Are Often Results of System-Wide Lapses

September 8, 2017 | Lebowitz & Mzhen

Pharmacy errors are much more common than most people believe. Indeed, according to some estimates, one in 12 patients are provided the wrong medication or an incorrect dose, or are given instructions that are not correct, given the patient’s specific circumstances. While most Maryland pharmacy errors do not result in serious harm to the patient, thousands of errors each year result in hospitalization.

According to a recent article, the British Health Secretary is so concerned with the high rate of prescription errors in his country that he has vowed to conduct an in-depth investigation into the root causes of these errors and to develop remedial measures to decrease the prevalence of pharmacy errors moving forward. The article explains that of the roughly one billion prescriptions filled by pharmacies each year, approximately 80 million contain some kind of error.

Some experts attribute the high rate of errors to frequent lapses of care across the health care system, including a lack of knowledge of primary care physicians and a hasty pharmacy environment. Researchers hope that the continued development of automated pharmaceutical dispensing systems will help to decrease error rates in the future; however, these systems come with their own risks of use.

Pharmacy Errors Resulting from Incorrectly Read Prescriptions

September 1, 2017 | Lebowitz & Mzhen

While pharmacy errors have a number of causes, one of the more common causes of Maryland prescription drug errors is when a pharmacist incorrectly reads the prescription form filled out by a patient’s physician. In the past, these errors have often been attributed to the poor penmanship of physicians. However, over recent years, the number of these errors has remained high despite new electronically completed prescription forms.

To be sure, pharmacists do not have an easy job, and a lot of responsibility rests on their shoulders. In many pharmacies, management keeps staffing levels low in order to save on labor costs. However, this decrease in pharmacy staff often comes at a cost – which is all too often paid by the patient.

As pharmacists take on more and more work per shift, their accuracy necessarily decreases because they are spending less time per patient. Indeed, there have been recent reports of pharmacists failing to submit their work to be double-checked and overriding electronic safety protocols.

Automated Prescription Dispensing Systems Still Capable of Making Errors

August 22, 2017 | Lebowitz & Mzhen

With the increase of pharmacy errors over the past several years, many pharmacies are looking to automated systems to reduce the element of human error in the filling of prescriptions. Indeed, most Maryland prescription errors are caused by busy pharmacists trying to keep up with what seems like a never-ending workload. While pharmacists are certainly well-intentioned, the reality is that by acting in haste, they place patients at risk.

In many cases, these automated systems use a series of bar codes to inventory, track, and dispense medication, making sure that the proper medication gets to the patient. However, even with the advent of these new automated systems, serious pharmacy errors still occur. When a pharmacy error does occur, the results may be devastating, especially when the patient is elderly or young, or when the medication in question carries serious side effects.

Infant’s Mother Provided Expired Medication at Retail Pharmacy

Earlier this month, the mother of a four-month-old baby was given medication for her child that had been expired for six months. According to a local news report covering the error, the child was suffering from a severe case of acid reflux and was prescribed medication for the condition by the family’s physician. The mother took the prescription to a local pharmacy, picking up four boxes of the medication. By the time the mother got back to her car, she double-checked the box and noticed that all four boxes had been expired for six months – two months before her baby was even born.

Pharmacy Errors Affecting Child and Young Adult Patients

August 15, 2017 | Lebowitz & Mzhen

Pharmacy errors always carry a risk of causing serious or potentially fatal consequences. However, when the victim of a Maryland pharmacy error is a child or young adult, the chances of the victim suffering serious injuries are greatly increased.

Pharmaceutical drugs, by their very nature, are extremely powerful substances that have the power to cure but also the power to cause serious harm. Even a slight variance in the prescribed dose of a medication to a child or young adult patient can result in serious injuries. However, the reality is that several thousand young patients are provided the wrong medication or the wrong dose of their medication each year. While the pharmaceutical industry is in the process of reworking the system to reduce these errors, there has yet to be any appreciable decrease in error rates among young patients.

Maryland Pharmacy Error Cases

When a pharmacist provides a young patient with the wrong type of medication or the wrong dose of their prescribed medication, and the patient suffers injuries as a result, the young patient and his family may be able to seek compensation for his injuries through a Maryland pharmacy error lawsuit. Most often, these cases are contested by pharmacies, and anyone considering bringing a pharmacy error claim should speak with a dedicated Maryland personal injury attorney prior to doing so.

Decimal-Point Mistakes Responsible for a Significant Number of Pharmacy Errors

August 8, 2017 | Lebowitz & Mzhen

Pharmacists rely heavily on an advanced command of mathematics to accurately fill prescriptions and avoid Maryland pharmacy errors. While some medications come pre-packaged, and all a pharmacist needs to do is double-check the physician’s instructions, other prescriptions require pharmacists to make small adjustments to dosage or administration instructions. This is especially the case in compounding pharmacies, which create specialized pharmaceutical compounds.

According to a recent industry news report, a significant number of pharmacy errors are caused by pharmacists incorrectly placing decimal points, or by the improper use of leading or trailing zeros. These errors, known as errors that involve a factor of 10, can result in a patient being given 10 times the required strength or one-tenth of the required strength, depending on the error.

The most common types of decimal point errors involve a pharmacist providing a patient with medication that is 10 times stronger than that which the patient’s physician prescribed. For example, if a physician prescribed a .5-mg dose, a pharmacist may miss the decimal point and provide the patient with a 5-mg dose. Of course, the dangers of this type of error are self-evident, especially when dealing with controlled substances.

Workplace Pressure Is a Key Factor in the High Rate of Maryland Pharmacy Errors

August 1, 2017 | Lebowitz & Mzhen

Pharmacists, like doctors and nurses, are medical professionals and are accordingly held to a high standard. This standard requires that pharmacists perform the duties of their job diligently, ensuring that patients are provided with accurate prescriptions and instructions on how to take their medication. When pharmacists make mistakes, anyone injured as a result of the mistake may be entitled to compensation through a Maryland pharmacy error lawsuit.

Pharmacy errors are responsible for tens of thousands of deaths across the United States each year, making it an important topic among researchers. The underlying causes of pharmacy errors vary, but according to a recent news article, workplace pressures are a major cause of pharmacy errors.

Historically, getting to the bottom of why pharmacy errors occur has been a difficult process, due to the lax reporting requirements. Indeed, the article explains that the number of pharmacy errors has remained constant over the past several years, but, due to changes in reporting requirements, the number of reported incidents has gone up. The researchers discovered that roughly 25% of all errors are caused by pharmacists providing the wrong medication to the patient, and another 25% of all errors are being caused by the pharmacist providing incorrect or unclear instructions on how to take the medication.

New Study Shows Increase in Medication Errors Occurring at Home

July 24, 2017 | Lebowitz & Mzhen

When researchers look into the causes of medication errors, errors are broken down into several categories. Two of the main types of Maryland medication errors are errors that occur in a hospital setting and those that occur in a patient’s own home.

When researchers refer to at-home medication errors, they are referring to prescriptions that are picked up at retailer hospital pharmacies and brought home, where the patient takes the medication without supervision. Hospital medication errors, on the other hand, are usually administered by a nurse or another medical professional while a patient is in in-patient care.

According to a recent study, the rate of at-home medication errors has been going up in the past few years. Researchers note that back in 2000, the medication error rate was 1.09 in every 100,000 patients. However, in 2012, that figure rose to 2.28 patients across all patient demographics except young children under the age of six. Researchers note that the errors most commonly involve cardiovascular drugs, analgesics, and hormone therapy medication.

Handwritten Prescriptions Show High Rate of Prescription Errors

July 17, 2017 | Lebowitz & Mzhen

Maryland prescription errors can occur at different stages in the prescription process. One of the ways errors can occur is when a pharmacist misinterprets the doctor’s handwriting on the prescription form. Errors can also occur when a doctor handwrites a prescription but forgets to include certain pertinent information.

Even when a prescription error is not fatal, it can still seriously affect a patient’s safety and quality of health. Advocates have encouraged doctors to reduce prescription errors by introducing automated systems, uniform prescribing charts, and immediate review of prescriptions. Some argue that in addition to improving the readability of prescriptions, electronic prescriptions can also help by providing the doctor with optimal dosages.

Study Finds Handwritten Prescriptions Contain More Mistakes than Electronic Prescriptions

According to one news source, a recent study looking at opioid prescriptions found that there were more mistakes in written prescriptions than in electronic prescriptions. The study looked at prescriptions filled at a pharmacy at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The researchers sought to determine whether prescription processing methods contributed to inconsistencies and errors in opioid distribution. The researchers reviewed all of the prescriptions processed for adults during a 15-day period. There were 510 prescriptions in total. The study evaluated the prescriptions based on three criteria: compliance with best practice guidelines, which include standards such as legibility and including the date; the inclusion of at least two patient identifiers; and compliance with federal opioid prescription rules, which require including the patient’s full name and address.