The Drugs Prescribed to You May Do More Harm Than Good

According to a report published by the Institute of Medicine, at least 1.5 million Americans are injured, sickened, or killed each year due to prescription errors. These errors may be in the prescribing, dispensing or taking medications. Medical malpractice in the form of making errors in giving drugs to patients in hospitals is so common that, on average, a patient in a hospital will be subjected to a medication error each day he/she occupies a hospital bed.

Past studies have indicated that drug errors cause at least 400,000 preventable injuries and deaths in hospitals each year; more than 800,000 in nursing homes and other facilities for the elderly; and 530,000 among Medicare recipients treated in outpatient clinics.

In a response to a request made by Congress in 2003, the Institute, which is a branch of the National Academies, undertook the most extensive study of medication errors ever conducted. The report found errors to be not only harmful and sometimes fatal but very costly, also. The added expense of treating drug-related injuries occurring in hospitals alone is estimated to be nearly $3.5 billion a year.

The institute's report asserts that many of the medication errors could be avoided if doctors adopted electronic prescribing, if hospitals had a standardized bar-code system for checking and dispensing drugs, and if patients made more of an effort to know what drugs they are taking and what the risks of those drugs are.

Some of the most common errors include doctors writing prescriptions that could dangerously interact with other drugs the patient is already taking, nurses putting the wrong drug, or wrong dose, in an I.V., and pharmacists dispensing the wrong dosage of a pill.

One very disturbing finding in the study published by the Institute of Medicine found that hospitals and long-term facilities generally do not report errors to patients or family members unless they result in serious injury or death. Obviously, all medication errors need to be reported, not just those resulting in serious injury or death.

A few years ago in Leesburg, VA, there was a tragic case of a medication mistake that killed a five-year-old boy who had a minor bed-wetting problem. His doctor had prescribed a medication containing 50mg of imipramine per teaspoon; however, at the pharmacy, the 50mg was mistyped by a pharmacy technician as 250mg, five times the correct amount. The pharmacist didn't notice the error and filled the prescription as the technician had typed it. The boy's mother gave her son the medication as directed, and the next morning she found his cold, lifeless body in his bed.

Unless more attention is given to this horrific form of medical malpractice taking place all over our country, these mistakes will continue, and more and more people with minor medical problems will be injured or killed due to someone else's negligence.

If you or a loved one has been injured or killed by a prescription or medication error in Jacksonville or anywhere in Florida, please contact the experienced Medical Negligence Attorneys at Hardesty Tyde Green & Ashton, P.A.

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