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America is facing a drug epidemic. 70% of Americans are currently on at least one prescription drug. While 50% of us take at least two.
Prescription drug spending totaled $457 billion last year with doctors prescribing 4.6 billion medications. However, not all of those 4.6 billion prescriptions were filled correctly. Pharmacists can accidentally administer the wrong drug or the wrong dosage, which results in you receiving a potentially harmful container of drugs.
It’s an easy mistake to make considering pharmacists can work shifts up to 14 hours long. By the end of a shift it’s not hard for an exhausted pharmacist to unknowingly make a prescription error.
In one such case a pharmacist had just been finishing up a 12 hour shift and a 60 hour work week when he accidentally filled a Ritalin prescription with a diabetes drug at 16 times the adult dosage. The 8-year old girl who took the medication fell into a coma and suffered permanent brain damage.
According to the FDA, over 1.3 million people are injured each year due to medication mistakes and approximately 3% of all hospital admissions are related to problems with medications.
With over 1 million medication errors occurring per year, how can we trust the drugs we receive? Learn more at:
https://www.faleslaw.com/practice-areas/prescription-drug-errors.html
Sources:
http://www.hannonlegalgroup.com/pharmacy-error-statistics.html
https://consumer.healthday.com/encyclopedia/drug-center-16/misc-drugs-news-218/avoiding-pharmacy-errors-646512.html
http://drugtopics.modernmedicine.com/drug-topics/news/dispensing-errors-claims-study-emphasizes-need-systematic-vigilance-pharmacy?page=full
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/study-shows-70-percent-of-americans-take-prescription-drugs/
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-healthcare-pricing-idUSKCN0WA2O0
http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DrugSafety/MedicationErrors/ucm080629.htm