Methadone is a strong opioid-based pain medication. According to Pain Treatment Topics (www.pain-topics.org), methadone overdoses and deaths have increased. Some of these incidences are associated with medical malpractice. Possible problems may be:

• Prescribing the wrong dosage of methadone
  
• Prescribing methadone without taking into consideration other medications the patient is taking and how those medication will interact with the methadone
• Methadone overdose due to nurse error or the error of another medical professional
  

Death or serious injury due to methadone overdose should be discussed with an experienced medical malpractice attorney.

Posted March 2008.

Labels: malpractice attorney, methadone, overdose

A recent study published in Pediatrics reviewed 960 randomly selected charts from 12 children's hospitals. The study found 107 unique adverse drug events, which, broken down, included 11.1 adverse drug events per 100 patients, 15.7 per 1000 patient-days, and 1.23 per 1000 medication doses.

According to the study, “Twenty-two percent of all adverse drug events were deemed preventable, 17.8% could have been identified earlier, and 16.8% could have been mitigated more effectively. The most common medication classes causing adverse drug events were opioids/ analgesics (51%) and antibiotics, and the most common stages of the medication management process associated with preventable adverse drug events were monitoring and prescribing/ordering.” The highest rate of adverse drug events per patient occurred in the hematology/oncology units.

Opioid analgesics include morphine, codeine, fentanyl and other pain medications. The risk is pain medication overdose. There are several reasons for this including:

1. The increased difficulty of calculating dosages of pain medication for children
2. Failure to adequately monitor the patient
3. The dangerous nature of these medications
   

These are extremely dangerous drugs and a small error in administration of these drugs can result in serious injury or death. There are also situations where the pain medication has adulterations or other defects that cause injury. For example, in the last few months, FDA has announced a number of recalls and health alerts involving fentanyl.

If your child experienced serious injury or death after being administered a pain medication or any medication in a hospital, you should contact a medical malpractice lawyer immediately. To contact attorney Fred Pritzker, managing attorney for our medical malpractice cases, for information on medication overdose lawsuits, please call 1-888-377-8900 (toll-free) or submit our free case consultation form.

Article: "Development, Testing, and Findings of a Pediatric-Focused Trigger Tool to Identify Medication-Related Harm in US Children's Hospitals,"Glenn S. Takata, MDa,b, Wilbert Mason, MD, MPHc, Carol Taketomo, PharmDe, Tina Logsdon, MSf and Paul J. Sharek, MD, MPHg, PEDIATRICS, Vol. 121 No. 4, April 2008, pp. e927-e935.

Labels: medication error, pain medication overdose