Recipe for Injury: Bad Prescribing and Bad Prescriptions
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One and a half million Americans are harmed each year at a cost of over $3.5 million dollars per year due to preventable mistakes; as reported by the New York Times recently. This article was based on a report issued by the Institute of Medicine this summer. These figures, according to the report, account for only the prescribing errors and not the errors resulting from drugs that did not work properly.
The Los Angeles Times set forth:
Many of the group's recommendations to reduce errors are things that individual consumers can't do much about,
such as processing all prescriptions electronically by 2010, making drug labels and inserts more intelligible,
standardizing drug information and improving access to it through the Internet and a 24-hour national telephone
hotline. But that doesn't mean consumers are helpless.
"Nothing that patients can do by themselves will make them truly safe," said Dr. Albert Wu, a professor at the Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and a coauthor of the report. "But they can start doing
things that can make them safer."
It seems clear to me that estimating the cost of only prescription errors at "over $3.5 million" must be the understatement of the year! People have suffered hemmorhages, strokes, heart attacks and many other complications due to pharmacists erring in filling prescriptions. Take a look at Tampa attorney Bob Carroll's Blog for a great summary of the devastation.
Not long ago, it was reported that some pharmacies were undertsaffing to save overhead and allegedly errors were proportionally escalating. Drug sales is such a big business; one would hope that apporiate staffing is the least we could ask.