Medical negligence is no laughing matter. Those given the wrong medication are at risk of death. If you take something with contraindications to your existing medicine, or if you have liver, heart, or kidney problems, the wrong type of medicine can hospitalize you – at best. This is a type of medical negligence that should not happen. Doctors should double check prescriptions before they ever reach you. If not, you could end up in serious trouble.
7 Types of Common Medication Errors in Illinois
If you think you have a case, get in touch with a medication error attorney. These lawyers specialize in cases just like yours, so they have contacts among medical professionals who can bypass that medical expert testimony and help you win your case. Doing it alone does not give you that same network of help.
1. Short Staffed
If the medical facility is short staffed, accidents can happen. Oversights are far more likely when you are rushing around trying to attend to all the patients. Friday and Saturday nights in hospital ER departments are notorious for being undermanned.
2. Pharmacy Dispensation Errors
If the pharmacy gives you the wrong medication, someone else’s medication, or the wrong dose of your medication, then they are liable for that. A pharmacist is a medical professional and giving you the wrong prescription is medical negligence.
3. Inexperience
It could be that you were the unlucky person who got to see the student doctor that day. Everyone must learn, but when the learning causes health issues for others, we must address it. Inexperience might mean a porter puts something away in the wrong place, or that a new nurse misses your vein when drawing blood.
4. Chart Swaps
Sometimes when you are in hospital, the staff pick up your chart and place it down in the wrong area. You could swap a number of charts this way. Swapping your chart could result in you receiving medical procedures you do not need. This is medical negligence and, understandably, you can sue for it.
5. Poor Handwriting
If the pharmacy can’t read the doctor’s handwriting, they might pass the buck of blame back to the hospital. Doctors are notorious for illegible handwriting. While this is not a problem most of the time, once in a while a misread sentence changes the course of a life.
6. Failing to Spot Contraindications
Contraindications are the different interactions that medicines have with one another. There are some medicines that have adverse reactions in you when we mix them. Failing to spot a contraindication could lead to something like an allergic reaction. This is traumatic.
7. Breach of Duty of Care
For those medical errors that do not fit into any other category, the onus is on the patient to prove that a duty of care existed and that the doctor breached it. A breach of duty of care might be leaving you waiting for three hours in an emergency, or it could be giving you the wrong medication based on someone else’s charts.
