Your 4 year-old daughter was prescribed Zyrtec for her allergies. For three weeks she took the medication that had been given to her but wasn't getting any better. When she went the doctors office... you find out why. The pharmacist had made a mistake. Your little daughter had been taking Zantec, an acid reflex medication.
It's a true story that a friend of mine was telling me a few weeks back. The mistake didn't make the little girl violently ill but what if it could have? How often do these pharmacy foul-ups happen?
I started with a call to the State Pharmacy board, the agency in charge of making sure pharmacists are playing by the rules.
3-4 million outpatient prescriptions are written a year in New York State.
The head of the state pharmacy board claims most they never know about most pharmacy foul-ups because consumers don't file complaints and pharmacist, like doctors and dentists aren't required to report them.
When a complaint does come in, an investigator is assigned to it. If it's anything other than "The drug is the same, it was just a generic" they normally forward those complaints onto the board.
The State Pharmacy Board received 111 complaints last year about prescription errors for review. Not all of them end in disciplinary action but some do, it depends how severe the error was. The board has to prove gross negligence once, or a pattern of negligence for disciplinary action to be taken.
So what causes the errors?
55% of prescription errors in NY are caused by bad handwriting or bad oral communication. A pharmacist couldn't make out the script so he/she did their best, or mis-understood what the physician's office was calling in.
Another big problem... a lot of medications have similar names, only one or two letters off.
The push to get doctor's offices and pharmacies using electronic prescription systems to cut down some of these errors is on but consumers should ask plenty of questions to make sure what's in that bottle is what was prescribed.
By law, every time you bring a new script in to be filled, your pharmacist should tell you the name of the drug and what it's used fore before you leave the counter. That simple extra minute can catch mistakes.
Again, most errors go un-reported because they're dealt with in-house by the pharmacist but if you're not satisfied with the response you get. File a complaint with the State Board of Pharmacy.
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