Staying Safe When It Comes to Your Prescriptions
Every year, as many as 98,000 deaths are attributed to medical errors that happen in hospitals - according to the National Coordinating Council for Medication Error Reporting and Prevention. This means that more people die as a result of medical mistakes than from car crashes, AIDS, or breast cancer. A significant number of these deaths are attributable to medication errors, which cause more deaths annually than workplace injuries.
Despite the seriousness and scope of the problem, however, medication errors have never received the degree of attention of many other grave public health issues. According to the American Medical Association, the most common types of medication errors are:
- Insufficient or incomplete patient information, such as misinformation concerning other medicines that patients are taking, allergies, or previous diagnoses and lab results.
- Out-of-date drug information, such as lack of up-to-date warnings.
- Miscommunication of prescriptions. This may involve poor handwriting, confusion between drugs with similar names, misuse of zeroes and decimal points, confusion of metric and other dosing units, and inappropriate abbreviations.
- Lack of appropriate labeling.
- Distracting environmental factors such as lighting, heat, noise, or interruptions.
Some of the most common errors —a pharmacist misreads a hastily written prescription; a patient fails to inform doctors about a crucial allergy; a harried physician prescribes an inappropriate medication—can lead to the untimely death of a loved one. In the interest of reducing the likelihood of such errors, organizations such as the National Patient Safety Partnership have created guidelines for the use of prescriptions for the benefit of both patients and providers.
If you or a loved one has suffered serious injury or even death due to medical malpractice, please contact Michael Barszcz, M.D., J.D., a medical malpractice lawyer, for a legal evaluation. Call (407) 329-3923 today to schedule a consultation or visit our website for more information about the legal services provided.
- Loading comments...
