Medical Malpractice – Pharmacists

Most medical malpractice suits involve doctors or hospitals, but medical malpractice is by no way limited to these two areas. It can include any healthcare professional and more and more cases involve pharmacists, as more combinations of drugs and more complex drugs are introduced into the marketplace. Annually over 1.3 million patients are victims of drug related injuries in the United States. Pharmacists need to have up-to date training and information about the newest drugs, interactions with other drugs, dosage and side effects. Their role is not to simply fill the prescriptions made out by doctors, they are trained professionals themselves and need to use the same kind of caution and due care as any other healthcare professional.

There are several important areas concerning medical malpractice by pharmacists. The most simple form of medical malpractice by pharmacists is medication error. It is frightening to know that there are over one million serious medication errors in the United States every year, with 20 per cent of these errors being life threatening or even fatal. Medication error is a general term that can cover anything from giving a patient the wrong drug to prescribing an inappropriate drug, administering the wrong dosage, mislabeling the drug and/or simple name confusion.

The most common medication errors are: lack of patient information (allergies, other drugs the patient is taking, diagnosis etc.); prescription errors (bad handwriting, mistake with dosage – missing zeros or decimal points - drug confusion due to drugs with similar names or misreading a prescription); out-dated drug information (doctor and/or pharmacist not up-to-date on new FDA warnings or manufacturer’s warnings, new tests, new laws etc.); drug labeling (mislabeling a drug, leading to wrong dosage, giving the wrong dosage etc.). Some mistakes are due to human errors made by the pharmacists, counting the drugs incorrectly, supplying the wrong drug which has a similar name, wrong dosage and/or not warning the patient about side effects or the proper procedure to take the medication. All these can lead to serious health complications and sometimes death and can lead to valid claims for medical malpractice.