Common Medication Errors

wrong medication There is no "typical" medication error, and doctors, nurses, hospitals, pharmacists, other medical personnel and drug manufacturers are all involved. Possible medication errors include the following:

The wrong drug is prescribed, administered, or given to a patient by a doctor, pharmacist, nurse or other medical professional.
The wrong dose of medicine is prescribed, administered, or given to a patient by a doctor, pharmacist, nurse or other medical professional. See Heparin Wrong Dose.
The prescribing doctor does not ask about or consider vital patient information, including a patient’s allergies, other medicines they are taking, previous diagnoses or lab results.
The prescribing doctor misdiagnoses the patient and then prescribes inappropriate medication.
The prescribing doctor and/or pharmacist does not have or consider up-to-date warnings about the medication.
Drug orders are miscommunicated due to poor handwriting, confusion between drugs with similar names, misuse of zeroes and decimal points, confusion of metric and other dosing units, and/or inappropriate abbreviations.
The pharmacist attaches the wrong label, an inaccurate label or an inappropriate label to the drug packaging.
The drug manufacturer provides the wrong drug label.
Health professionals do not use the correct route to administer the drug.
A drug is given to the wrong patient by a pharmacist, nurse, doctor or other hospital personnel.

For information on patient safety, please see the following:

We also have information on medication errors on our Medical Malpractice Lawyer Blog.

To contact a medication error lawyer at Pritzker | Ruohonen, please call toll-free at 1-888-377-8900 or submit the firm's online consultation form.

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