Medication error cases are a leading cause of preventable death in the United States. The Institute of Medicine estimates that medication errors account for approximately 7,000 to 8,000 deaths per year. Most medication errors happen when people don’t take their medications as directed and experience side effects. However, medical professionals also make mistakes in prescribing or dispensing medications, leading to errors. Here is a guide to medical error cases.
Table of Contents
1. Physician Errors
Medication errors are a subset of medical errors and may include prescribing or dispensing medication in the wrong dose, at the wrong time, or with the wrong drug. Patients also make mistakes when they don’t take their medications as directed.
Most medication errors happen when people don’t take their medications as directed and experience side effects. However, medical professionals also make mistakes in prescribing or dispensing medications, leading to errors. Medication error attorneys can help patients or their families understand how to recognize a medical error case.
2. Drug Side Effects
Drugs may have unwanted side effects or cause unexpected reactions. For example, some drugs can cause neurological symptoms such as dizziness and drowsiness. Symptoms of a drug overdose include increased blood pressure, fast heartbeat, confusion, and unconsciousness. Drugs can also interact with each other in dangerous ways or be substituted with another drug in a dose that doesn’t work as well as the original drug.
3. Prescription Errors
Doctors and pharmacists write prescriptions. Pharmacists dispense medications and also write prescriptions for specific conditions. A prescription error occurs when a patient receives the wrong treatment for a condition or the wrong drug without knowing this. There may be an error in how the prescription is filled or written.
This error may occur if a doctor prescribes the wrong dosage, prescribes the wrong drug, doesn’t indicate how the medication should be prepared or stored, or specifies that the insurance pays for the drug without explaining why.
4. Dispensing Errors
A dispensing error occurs when a drug is issued to the wrong patient or is given a too large dose for the patient’s condition. Some medications are easily confusing and similar in name, appearance, or function. This can lead to medication errors unless pharmacies institute safeguards to prevent them from happening.
5. Intentional Mistakes
A pharmacist or nurse may intentionally make a medical error to steal prescription drugs or sell them for profit. For example, the drug Ondansetron prevents nausea and vomiting in chemotherapy patients. The drug is also mixed with heroin and sold on the street as a more potent form of the narcotic. A nurse who steals this drug can mix it with heroin and sell it without the patient’s knowledge.
6. Adverse Reactions
Inadvertent mistakes may also include medication reactions. The patient takes medication but experiences a side effect, such as an allergic reaction or an unexpected reaction in the body. Or drug interaction may occur when the patient takes two or more drugs at once without knowing it could have caused a harmful reaction.
Some patients experience an adverse drug reaction due to improper medication handling during preparation or administration. Such errors may result when medication is sprinkled on food or in drinks, like orange juice. The patient swallows the medication without realizing it, which causes a reaction.
Conclusion
These medical errors are a great problem today. Today’s sophisticated prescribing of medications and the risk of medication errors can make it hard for patients to find the information they need to be more successful in their healthcare. Unfortunately, healthcare professionals who are sometimes not properly supervised and trained are sometimes the cause if a mistake does occur. We can’t blame them for not getting up to date with current technology, but supervisors should be checking on their nurses and physicians to see if they understand current standards.
