I just went to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription refill. The price was a little more than I had paid last time, but that’s nothing unusual. After I paid for it, as I was putting it in my shopping cart, I happened to look at the sticker. The drug name was totally unfamiliar to me, but I thought maybe it was a different generic that had a different name. So I looked at the patient’s name on the sticker, and it was a name that was very similar to mine, but it wasn’t me.
I returned to the counter, and we got it all straightened out.
Wow! Suppose I hadn’t checked the label; suppose I had just taken the pills home and taken them! Even if they looked different than my usual pills, I would have assumed it was a different generic. Who knows what kind of medication I’d be taking, and what effects it would have on me, not to mention that I wouldn’t be taking my normal med.
There’s a huge lesson here about never assuming. Especially when it involves your health.
Definitely. Once my pharmacist not incorrectly filled my prescription, but the drug he filled it with was one I was allergic to. And this was a small, family-owned pharmacy that knows me by name.
My husband didn’t notice that his pills were different-looking until he got them home. The label was right, but they didn’t look like the last one. I did some checking and it turns out he had, in fact, been issued the correct medication - it was merely a different company’s version of the pill, which had been issued as a generic prescription. So thankfully not all of these stories have bad results, but even if he’d noticed at the pharmacy counter, a pharmacist could have allayed his fears at the time, so it’s still a good practice to get in the habit of.
My pharmacist has made it a policy to look at the pills one last time in his customers presence. He will open the bottle and pour a couple into the lid and have you check them with him. IMHO, that should be SOP everywhere.
I write a lot of prescriptions, and write down the wrong name a few times a year. The patient usually catches my error; if not, the pharmacist does. Pharmacists call me a lot, nine times out of ten nothing needs to be changed. Everyone makes mistakes, more so when working stressful long hours. I’m very grateful to our local pharms for catching my mistakes and am sure they make errors too. You should make a point of knowing what you are taking, why and when – double checking your name, medicine name and dose. It is not reasonable to assume health professionals don’t make mistakes, clearly they do.
I knew of a pharmacist that mixed up a husband and wife’s prescriptions. The husband had a cold & was supposed to get cough syrup. The wife had some “woman issues” and required vaginal suppositories. The instructions were correct for each person, just the contents of the bottles were wrong. The pharmacist discovered the problem when the man cam back into the store saying his wife was having difficulty with getting the syrup to stay inside her <ahem> and he just didn’t think he could “swallow another of those big pills”. LOL
Apparently, Vets can and do write prescriptions for animals, to be filled at a pharmacy.
My wife picked up a sinus prescription for me, and we found two bottles in the bag. One for me, and one for a canine, whose name was one letter off from my last name.
Arf!
I once had a Pharmacist who gave me the wrong medication. It was something that I had been on for awhile and when I got home, the pills looked very different. I called them and the one on duty told me to bring them back. He looked at them and turned red with anger. He apologized and refilled my pills.
They do. Mom is a nurse and sometimes has to call a doctor to “clarify an order” and sometimes it turns out to be wrong. It is hard not to make a mistake if you have been up for the past 36 hours.
Yes, they do - once I had the turnabout of a pharmacist questioning a prescription I brought in. He looked at the tiny dose of digoxin and asked if it was for an infant; I had to explain that no, it was for a ferret.
For my job (I do a lot of medical translation), I bought a dictionary of medical abbreviations. The first chapter is a very grim recitation of all the things that can go wrong when easily confused abbreviations are used. Here are some of them:
As a pharmacy technician, I’d like to mention that this is a very pretty thought but when you push out anywhere between 200-400 rxs a day, this is absolutely impossible. Some stores I know of do between 600-800 a day.
I once went to pick up a prescription for painkillers following dental surgery. The pills I got were for someone else whose name was remarkable similar to my own (the first name was missing a single letter and the last name was another way of spelling my last name). The strange thing was we had nearly identical prescriptions: his pills were for a slightly stronger Vicodin than mine were. Unfortantely, I didn’t actually notice it until I was most of the way through the bottle (for fairly obvious reasons).
The gov’t agency I work for funds patient safety research, and publishes some brochures on ways people can avoid medication errors. As a public service announcement, I give you: