When is the last time you actually checked the label on your prescription bottle against the prescription your doctor handed you? Your pharmacist has the technology to communicate directly with your doctor and access your records digitally to keep track of your prescriptions.
With that in mind, it’s safe to assume when you go to the pharmacy that your prescription is correct, isn’t it? The reality is that pharmaceutical negligence occurs more often than you may think.
Any time a person is involved, human error may occur. And when mistakes are made by pharmacists, the results can be catastrophic.
When a person experiences an injury or death as a result of pharmaceutical negligence, such as a prescription misfill (when a pharmacist dispenses an incorrect drug), dispensing the wrong strength of the correct drug or providing incorrect directions for use on the prescription container (commonly known as the mislabeling of a drug), it is important to speak with a knowledgeable law firm who understands pharmaceutical negligence cases.
What is Pharmaceutical Negligence?
Every year, pharmacists fill approximately 4 billion prescriptions in the United States. As a result, approximately 1.3 million patients experience some sort of negative reaction resulting from improper prescription care, mislabeling, and more. These acts of malpractice lead to at least one person dying every day as a result of pharmaceutical negligence.
As you can see, pharmaceutical negligence happens at an alarmingly high rate, so it’s imperative that you and other consumers be cognizant of the effects of pharmaceutical negligence – and your options to file a pharmaceutical negligence case if something like this happens to you.
Pharmaceutical negligence cases can occur due to a variety of different things. For one, patients may be prescribed a drug that has been known to cause adverse side effects.
Because ensuring drug safety can be a time-consuming process, drugs are often prescribed without knowledge of how they can damage a patient’s health. This leads to allergic reactions, drug combination reactions, adverse side effects, and more, which can all cause pain and suffering for a patient.
Another thing that leads to pharmaceutical negligence is pharmacist error. When it comes to translating a doctor’s prescription from paper (or computer system) to fulfillment, pharmacists can err in designating and assigning correct dosage instructions and/or quantities. Oftentimes, this can include a mistake in label printing or an incorrect dose selection, which can result in drug overdose, damage to the body’s internal organs, and even worse, death.
Why Do Pharmaceutical Negligence Cases Occur?
While the reasons for the behaviors that result in pharmaceutical negligence cases can be countless, the most common reasons include: distractions while working, tying pharmacist/physician pay to volume distribution of a particular drug, inadequate pharmacy regulations, and failure to comply with product recalls.
Additionally, our team has seen a number of cases where improper safety procedures and precautions are key contributors to proving negligence.
While at times, the circumstances that lead to pharmaceutical negligence may be considered “honest mistakes,” they are still inexcusable. As consumers, we put our trust in physicians and pharmacists to do their jobs correctly.
When pharmaceutical negligence occurs, that trust is broken, and our expectations as patients are shattered. That’s where experts like the pharmaceutical negligence attorneys at Gold & Gold can help.
What Can You Do if You Have a Pharmaceutical Negligence Case?
There are many ways pharmacists can make mistakes that lead to catastrophic loss. Because of this, it’s important to find a lawyer that has enough experience to determine how and why the mistake was made. Our attorneys have dealt with these issues before, and understand the intricacies involved in proving responsibility in pharmaceutical negligence cases.
At Gold & Gold, we pride ourselves in putting our clients’ best interests first and making sure that they are represented properly, which often means bringing in specialists and industry experts to help secure a verdict.
In one case, our pharmaceutical negligence attorneys fought for the two surviving sons of a woman killed as a result of an improperly prescribed morphine pill. The pill, also called a “fat pill” because of its size, contained an extremely high dosage of morphine that was too much for the woman’s body to take.
After a few days of taking the pill, her heart stopped and she died in her sleep. Because her death was initially ruled as natural, the pills were thrown out, but the family suspected they were to blame. The attorneys at Gold & Gold were concerned about how the extremely high morphine dosage could have affected the woman’s body and hired a top level toxicologist to examine the woman’s toxicology report.
The expert found that the morphine pills introduced a dangerously high amount of the drug into her system and were likely the main cause of her death. The manufacturer and pharmacy settled for a confidential amount.
If you think you or a member of your family has been injured by a pharmacy’s mistake, you need to find an attorney who will fight for you. At Gold & Gold, we’ve made it our mission to fight for justice for all of our clients. Don’t hesitate, reach out to one of our attorneys for a free consultation today.