Prescription drug errors happen every day in this country. There many ways they can happen, and when prescriptions go wrong, the results can be devastating. The errors may be by a physician, pharmacist, or staff administering medication. The negligence may be prescribing the wrong medication (or wrong dosage), giving the patient the wrong medication (or wrong dosage), prescribing a contraindicated medication, or failing to warn of risks of the medication, to name just a few.

Negligence in ordering the wrong prescription or its wrong dosage can happen when the provider makes a mistake and orders the wrong drug. This could include prescribing a drug for an off-label use (a common practice). An example of this may be prescribing a drug for a substantially longer period of time than is recommended. For example, we have handled several cases where physicians ordered dosages multiple times (sometimes hundreds of times) greater than the indicated dosage. Similarly, a transposed decimal point may mean that, even if the correct amount was ordered, a huge dosage was subsequently administered.

A contraindicated prescription may be, for example, if the doctor prescribes a drug to which the patient is allergic. These allergies are often identified in the patient’s chart, so there should be multiple opportunities for the provider, the properly set up electronic health record, or the pharmacist to catch the order before the patient takes the medication. Common examples are allergies to certain antibiotics. Alternatively, some patients have chronic conditions, not allergies, that will cause severe reactions to the wrong medications. Again, that is another reason why our medical records keep track of our chronic conditions, too.

Additionally, some drugs may be administered incorrectly – something that’s meant to be mixed and taken orally may be in fact administered intravenously. That powder that was supposed to be taken up through the patient’s GI tract, now ends up as concretions in the patients veins. You can imagine that’s not a good situation for the patient.

And finally, (at least for purposes of this blog) failing to warn a patient of the risks and side effects of the medication prevents the patient from making an informed decision about the medication.