What are some statistics for pharmaceutical malpractice?

To Louisiana residents like you, the images of doctors, nurses and hospitals may come to mind when you think of medical malpractice. However, this type of wrongdoing can occur at any level of the medical field, all the way from the people who write and recommend prescriptions down to the ones who get those prescriptions filled.

According to U.S. News, between 1 and 5 percent of all prescriptions filled in America have some sort of prescription error. This can include potential mistakes like:

• Putting the wrong pill into the wrong bottle
• Prescribing the wrong dosage
• Prescription labels that don’t have correct instructions
• Missing bad interactions between prescriptions

Though most of these issues do not result in any permanent or severe harm, that isn’t always the case. Additionally, it can leave patients like you feeling unsafe to learn that these mistakes may happen at all.

So what causes these issues? A number of factors can contribute to malpractice in the pharmacy. This includes a doctor’s handwriting being read incorrectly, or a lack of time. Many busy pharmacists will fill numerous prescriptions every hour. This can result in simple mistakes like reading labels wrong, grabbing the wrong medicine, and so on. Not helping this is the fact that some medicines share a very similar appearance or name, making quick visual separation and identification even harder to manage.

Unfortunately, medical malpractice in the pharmaceutical industry is something even you might face someday with statistics like this. In that scenario, being armed with knowledge can be your best defense.