Medications are among the most common treatments recommended in modern medical facilities. Doctors can help patients control their blood pressure, lose weight or fight infections with appropriate medication.
Medications are controlled substances that are subject to the law. Patients generally cannot legally access or use these medications without a doctor’s recommendation. As such, they expect a physician to make an informed decision about the medication that they recommend.
Many patients might assume that medication errors occur at pharmacies. However, quite a few mistakes related to prescription medication occurred during the prescribing process. Doctors make mistakes, often because they do not devote enough time to reviewing the situation at hand.
Insufficient review
Many doctors can only spend a few minutes with each of their patients. They may have an overall patient load in the hundreds, meaning that they cannot remember all of the details about a patient’s history. They also do not have enough time to conduct a thorough review of the patient’s medical records before reaching a diagnostic conclusion or starting to develop a treatment plan.
Doctors who do not listen to their patients at length and go thoroughly over their charts could overlook contraindications that mean a medication is not the best option for a particular patient. They could also potentially prescribe a drug that has a dangerous interaction with another medication the patient already takes.
Transcription errors
Pharmacists and the technicians assisting them once had a very challenging job. They had to make sense of what a doctor wrote on a prescription pad with nearly illegible writing. Most medical practices have since converted to digital prescription arrangements. Doctors input information into a computer system and send the information directly to the patient’s preferred pharmacy.
While this may eliminate confusion about handwriting, it creates an entirely new opportunity for data entry mistakes. Typing two letters in the wrong order might mean that the computer inputs the wrong medication name. A slip of the finger might result in a dangerously high dose or an ineffectively low dose of a medication that a patient requires. Minor transcription errors can have a major impact on the safety and efficacy of a prescription drug regimen.
When another physician can readily identify a prescribing error and could have avoided causing the same issue, the situation may constitute medical malpractice. Holding a doctor accountable for medication errors that harm patients can help people cover their medical costs and may prompt changes to how a doctor cares for patients in the future.