Our local paper, The Roanoke Times, ran a syndicated article today from Joe and Teresa Graedon better known at The People’s Pharmacy.
The article should be an “eye opener” to everyone who takes prescription medication…and that is a lot of people. The article warns consumers to be wary of mistakes in filling prescriptions…the wrong medicine…or the wrong dose.
How frequently does this happen? According to the article, about 1 in 5 prescriptions dispensed contain some form of error citing a report from the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association. Further, approximately 3% of the prescription errors were judged to be capable of harming the patient. The seriousness of the frequency of mistakes is even scarier when you multiply the 3% serious error rate by the 3 billion prescriptions dispensed each year and you find that there are potentially 90 million harmful errors in filling the prescriptions.
We have previously written about pharmacy negligence cases and provided our readers with important information here.