If you have any kind of medical condition, there’s a whole line of people involved in your care — and that includes your pharmacist.
Just like any other medical professional, pharmacists can make mistakes. When they do, innocent people can end up seriously injured — and negligent pharmacists can be held accountable through medical malpractice claims.
What causes pharmaceutical mistakes?
According to research, 75% of the medication errors that end up hurting patients can be attributed to one cause: Someone got distracted. That distraction can manifest in a number of ways. For example:
- The pharmacist fails to ask (or check the system) for the patient’s known allergies.
- The wrong drug is dispensed (often because it either looks like the correct drug or is similarly named).
- The right drug is dispensed but at the wrong dosage (either too high or too low).
- The pharmacist fails to notice the alert that signals a new prescription is contraindicated by another prescription the patient is already using.
- The pharmacist fails to properly educate the patient about how to take or store the medication for safety and effectiveness.
- The pharmacist dispenses an expired product that has lost its effectiveness.
- The pharmacist gives one patient another patient’s medication by mistake.
Pharmacy errors can happen both inside hospital settings (even when the medication is delivered by a nurse or doctor), in nursing homes and through retail pharmacies when a patient picks up their regular medications.
If you’ve been harmed by a pharmacist’s negligence or a loved one was killed, you have every right to hold that person accountable for their mistakes.
