In Nashville a five-year-old boy is given the wrong prescription for two months. He was suppose to get medication for hand tremors and hyperactivity but instead got adult presecribed steriods. He started to show early signs of puberty and woyuld through uncontrolable tantrums.
It took two months for the pharmacy to notice the problem. The parents sued Walgreens and so have many other people with siminalr cases.
With Americans wanting everything fast, pharmacys are forced to put out hundreds of prescriptions daily. Pharmacists have little time for breaks and work long hours. This leaves room for many mistakes.
There have been new safety laws that have cut the error rates to 1%. Even so there is still dangerous errrors that can effect anyone with a sinus infection.
I know I would be furious if I ever recieved a different medication or the wrong dosage. A man from Jacksonville overdosed on Methadone after recieving a wrong dosage. Its errors like these that can have a huge effect on Americans. Its scary to think that we could die or have irraverrisable side-effects if a pharmacist slips up.
I can only hope that safety laws will stop these errors. Also, I thihk pharmacists should be able to focus on the prescription and not getting them to people faster.
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5 comments:
That is horrible what happened to that little boy. In my opinion although Americans may want something fast when it comes to medical situations I'd rather wait a little long and know something has been done correctly then put my life or loved ones in danger.
It is scary to think that pharmacists are people we trust, like police officers, doctors, etc, and they could end up hurting us, wether it be intentional or not.I myself have taken may prescriptions, and they all have horrible side effects if taken in the wrong dosage.
It is horrible to see what the pharmacies in this country are doing, but they should not get all the blame. In order to get a prescription a doctor has to write it for the individual. If the doctor prescribes the wrong prescription to the patient, then it should be the doctor's fault and not the pharmacist. However, there are many dosage mistakes given by pharmacies and that is what they should be resonsible for.
The boy who was given adult medication was a situation that the parents should have questioned.
I had a similar experience with my daughter and I just completely stopped giving her the medication, because it didn't do what it was supposed to do. The follow-up with her doctor told me I did the write thing.
If a parent or someone else who thinks the medication is not doing what it is supposed to be doing, just stop giving or taking it. Don't blame others if you can fix the problem first hand.
I think its a little early to Jump-On-The-Bandwagon and start hating on pharmacists, along with worrying about being given the wrong prescription.
Its definitely not something to be ignored, but people tend to go into mass hysteria when something like this happens.
Pharmacists are over-worked and that is only coming to be solved by having more workers...speeding up filling persciptions isn't.
A larger number of the baby-boomers are getting older and older, causing a shortage of pharmacists.
Increasing the interest for people in the field of pharmacy would be a good step...not panicing!
I have a friend who is a pharmacist. Once upon a time, she had quite a few people verbally thrashing her because their prescriptions weren't ready. She politely, but firmly, stated that she wasn't about to make a mistake on someone's medication just to shave off a few minutes of others waiting time. After that, they were silent.
I can understand the frustration that both sides are feeling. We are such an instant gratification society that waiting an hour for a prescription seems outlandish; it is here that problems tend to occur. Maybe if we would all slow down to actually let others breath we might be able to get off of some of the medications we have to take for stress.
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