The effects of medication errors range from mild to severe. Some people only suffer a few side effects while others come close to death. When a medication error causes you significant harm or distress, you might be able to sue for medical malpractice. Determining what caused the medication error is crucial to proving your claim. Talk to a Kansas City medical malpractice lawyer to figure out what steps this will take.
What Causes Medication Errors
There are dozens of causes of medication errors that happen because of mistakes made within the process. They might happen while prescribing or in the last few steps of instructing the patient how to use the medicine and monitoring side effects. This means fault can fall on your doctor, a member of your clinical team, or even a pharmacist.
For example, a doctor can make a medication error by:
- Prescribing the wrong dosage
- Prescribing the wrong type of medicine
- Failing to ask about allergies
- Not doing a thorough medical history check
- Not following up with patients on adverse side effects
Medical staff members and pharmacy workers can make mistakes because of:
- Distractions at work
- Illegible writing that becomes misinterpreted
- Distortions
- Judgmental errors
Distortions happen when similar-sounding names of medications are mixed up, or symbols and abbreviations for medications are misinterpreted. This is also how incorrect dosing occurs. All it takes is one letter or number to be off to cause a major error.
Pharmacists and doctors make judgment errors when they don’t adequately screen a patient for medication or fail to look for potential drug interactions. Judgment oversight also includes not telling the patient about how to safely use the medicine.
Why Would I File a Medication Error Claim?
Usually, the grounds for a medical malpractice claim hinge on someone having a potential adverse drug event. This is regarded as an avoided mistake that could have caused legal trouble. If you were harmed by a medication error, you need to find the source and prove negligence.
Gather evidence that indicates your physician, a pharmacist, or even a pharmaceutical manufacturing company made the error. It’s possible to have multiple points of fault. For example, determining the manufacturer as the negligent party is often straightforward when the error involved inadequate medication labels with poor instructions or no listed side effects. Also, the pharmacist might be partially at fault because they didn’t question the mistakes in the documentation about the drug.
A lawyer can help you investigate what happened and find evidence of malpractice. Taking this step could help you secure a proper financial recovery.