Double Check Your Prescriptions
January 3, 2007 by Lei
Filed under Diseases & Conditions
For a couple of years during college, I worked at a high volume pharmacy helping to type labels, sort filled prescriptions, and transcribe phone-in refills. The truth is, mistakes happened every day. Sometimes prescriptions went missing. Othertimes the wrong bag of meds would be handed to the wrong person or a label mistyped. It’s all human error and the busier the pharmacy, the more likely it is to happen. With computerized systems, mistakes probably happen far less often. But in my day (1990-2), we still typed labels on typewriters and handwrote refill requests. Doctors, of course, still write their scripts (prescriptions) by hand in their often illegible handwriting.
Jane Brody of the New York Times writes more about her own father’s experience with drug errors:
A similar error befell my father at a leading New York hospital. After weeks of intensive care following a massive heart attack, he was sent home with medication from the hospital pharmacy to prevent his body from rejecting his damaged heart. He was about to take the first pill when my mother noticed that the name on the vial was Mrs. Rosenberg, not Sidney Brody, and that it contained estrogen, not the prednisone my father needed.
Ultimately, we are the ones responsible for the medications we take. We need to know what drugs have been prescribed to us – if we’re allergic to them, why we need them, how much we should take, how long we’re to be on them, and whether any of them interact adversely with each other. Writing it all down and bringing it to your doctor’s apopintments is critical.
Have you ever experienced a medication mix-up? Share your experience with us in the comments or email me!
Tags: heart disease, heart, heart attack, diseases, illness, health, prescriptions, pharmacy, drugs, medication, cardiovascular disease
