Gerry Oginski: Welcome, thank you for joining me. I am Gerry Oginski, a Medical Malpractice and Personal Injury Trial Lawyer, practicing law here in the State of New York. Today's topic is pharmacy errors; what are they and how do you recognize them.
Pharmacy errors arise typically when a patient goes to pick up their medication and they go home and they start taking the medication without thinking, without looking at the particular pill or reading the inserts that a company of the mediation. Typically, what happens is, is that the patient gets ill or seek or has some side-effect as a result of the medication you are taking. Shortly after going to the hospital or going to the doctor, do they realize that the medication that they have been taking was not the prescribed medication and we are able to go back, look at the pharmacy prescription, see what was ordered, what was prescribed, the reason for it and what was actually dispensed. And there are books put out by the manufacturer that will show you the exact tablet, the exact pill that you should be getting when you are prescribed the particular medication.
So, what happens when you take something that is not correctly prescribed or inadvertently prescribed? Well, most of the time patients don't suffer any long-term permanent injuries because they realize it soon after they are taking their medication that it has been wrongly prescribed or wrongly given to them. Sometimes the pharmacy dispenses medication when they cannot read the doctor's prescription and there are similar prescriptions in which case it may result in damage or injury. Other times you may have a situation where there is a decimal point moved or it looks like instead of being 0.5, the pharmacist may make a mistake and make the dosage stronger than it should be given and you may suffer some injury as a result of that or you may be given somebody else's prescription or you may be given the wrong pills for your prescription.
The pharmacist, who is reading the doctor's prescription, may not be able to read it correctly and give you an incorrect medication because he couldn't read it and didn't bother to pick up the phone and call the doctor to find out what exact medication you were supposed to get. The pharmacist may make a mistake in getting the dosage. Another common mistake that we see from time to time is where the pharmacist actually gives you and dispenses a medication and is labeled the correct medication but you've given the wrong pill and you were given a whole set of wrong pills and you take it without realizing that it's not your typical pills that you have been taking and suffer some form of injury.
Another way is that you are given another patient's medication and although that does not happen often, from time to time it does happen and even though, these pharmacists have these fail-safe devices and procedures in place to try in limit and minimize these mix ups, they do unfortunately happen. So, how is it that an attorney will learn about it? Typically, a client will come to us and say, you know what, my mom, my dad or I was taking a medication for a period of time and all of a sudden, we started to get these problems; I started to get bleeding, I started to go dizzy, noxious and we went to the hospital and they ran these tests and they asked me what medication I was taking and I shown them the pills and they checked with their pharmacy and it turns out, it's the wrong dosage or the wrong medication, that's funny.
An attorney has to determine not just that there was wrongdoing but that the wrongdoing caused the injury and that the injury is significant and permanent. So, what happens if your injury is temporary and once you start taking the medication, you no longer have any permanent injury? Well, it's great for you, bad for potential case. But what happens if you do have a significant injury following the taking of medication that never should have been given to you? Well, then we have to look to see how significant your injuries are, we have to determine what treatment you need, and what treatment you need for the future. And those are some of the things that you need to know about in order to evaluate whether or not you have a valid case for prescription errors against the pharmacy.
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