A film documentary was created to show the startling dangers of medication errors. Medical mistakes are the third leading cause of death in patients. This means that more people are dying from medication errors than they are from respiratory diseases, accidents, strokes, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, pneumonia, nephritis, and suicide. The first two are heart disease and cancer. Medical mistakes should not be in the top three with over 440,000 deaths. The young man who created the documentary equated the number of deaths with a jumbo jet crashing every day for a year. Those numbers seem unfathomable, but it is true.
What Is Medication Error?
It is what it sounds like. It is a kind of medical mistakes and can be deadly. How does a patient get the wrong medicine? Simple: they are either prescribed the wrong medication, given the wrong dose of the medication or not given the right kind of medication. So what happens when you are given the wrong medication? Well, it can either result in injury or it can increase your already injured situation. In a case from England, a woman has prescribed an erectile dysfunction cream instead of a cream that would help her eye condition.
The cream causes her to have a chemical reaction. When she put the wrong cream to her eye, it started to swell, get red, and she had blurred vision. She was only following the doctor’s orders. Nowadays the prescriptions are all digital, unfortunately, her prescription was still handwritten which may have been the root cause for the error. Regardless of technology or handwritten, you rely on your doctors and medical staff for accurate information. When you experience something other than what is expected it can be very traumatizing as well as life-threatening. The most common place for miscommunication between patient and medical staff is when a new patient is getting admitted.
When you are entering a new place of care be sure to fill out all your forms completely and thoroughly. Make sure whoever sees you checks your chart and recognizes everything that you are on. The next most common place is patient discharge. When a patient is discharged communication happens between doctor and pharmacy. The best way to ensure, both pharmacists and patients, that the medication is correct, you should ask lots of questions about what is being given to you. This way you can make sure that what you are given is what you need.
What To Do
The responsibility should not always fall on the patient. People in the medical field should be held responsible because it is their job to assign the medication correctly. If you or a loved one have experienced an issue with a medication error, small or large, then you need to call 267-587-6240 or click here to consult with our professional legal team at The Weitz Firm, LLC in Philadelphia. Our Medication Error Attorneys have over the experience and knowledge to get you the justice you deserve for the injury you sustained.
