Local Pharmacy Makes Mistake With Child’s Prescription
COLUMBUS, Ohio—You trust your pharmacist to give you the right medicine when you’re sick, but a Central Ohio mother learned to check the prescription labels twice.
Days after giving her 2-year-old daughter what she thought was amoxicillin, Randie Reed discovered the pink liquid was not the antibiotic after all, NBC 4‘s Candice Lee reported.
Last Friday, Reed said she took her daughter to their doctor, discovering an ear infection.
Armed with a prescription for amoxicillin, Reed filled the order at the Walgreen’s pharmacy on state Route 161 and Maple Canyon Drive.
“The one says amoxicillin, I just figured they both said amoxicillin,“ Reed said.
Then, on Sunday, Reed said she noticed the bottles, although identical in size and color of substance inside, were two difference antibiotics. One bottle read amoxicillin and the other read cephalexin.
“She had been taking the cephalexin. She took three doses of it, which are two teaspoons each,“ Reed said.
Fortunately, Reed’s daughter did not react to the drug mix-up, but the obvious error concerned Reed.
“I could see it could be an honest mistake. But you can’t really take a chance making mistakes with someone’s medicines,“ Reed said.
NBC 4 contacted Walgreen’s about the mistake. In a statement, officials said, “Cases like these are rare and we take them very seriously. We’re sorry this occurred and we apologized to the family.
“We have a multi-step prescription filling process with numerous safety checks in each step to reduce the chance of human error.
“We will investigate what happened and what can be done to prevent it from happening again.“
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Reader Reactions
It’s not just the Rx industry. A big storm hits, your electric goes out, your cable goes out, and heaven forbid your internet goes out so you can’t check your MySpace. America has come to expect everything to work properly right away in any industry. You go to a crowded restaurant you still want your order taken and drink in minutes and your food 5-10 minutes later. I would say this is the standard society has brought upon because the customer is always right. I attempt to look at both sides before I complain about a wait.
As a pharmacist who works in retail, I have to say that the majority of customers probably share the same attitude as b1atcl. Unfortunately, the old adage ‘patience is a virtue’ has fallen by the wayside. Not only is this seen in pharmacy, but healthcare in general. Frequently, people will complain about how long they had to wait at the doctor’s office for their appointment. Personally, if being ‘inconvenienced’ by waiting translated into receiving optimal care (i.e. receiving a correct diagnosis, appropriate prescription[s], etc…), I would be willing to sacrifice my time to be ensured of this. In retail pharmacy, pharmacist’s HAVE to be efficient (i.e. speedy) multitaskers. Unfortunately, attempting to swiftly perform 3 tasks at once potentially can lead to dispensing errors. I’m not saying that justifies the mistake, but succumbing to impatient customers can sometimes be a prescription for disaster.
338aught06 - They make those little blue stickers so I can read the answer to those questions and not spend all day at Walgreens.
BleedColtsBlue - Most employers want an employee who can do the job properly as quick as possible. If that’s not you maybe you should consider another career field.
Shame on that parent for not going over the medication with her pharmacist before leaving, and for not reading the label. This is a lesson to all parents - do this before you are in such a hurry to leave the pharmacy!! How much do I give my child? Do I give it with meals? How do I store it? Will there be any bad side effects, and what do I do then?
NBC - please work with Walgreens to come up with a set of hints to ask your pharmacist. That would be good PR.
Let me clarify my last post by saying that I do not blame doctors for the mistakes made by pharmacists. Mistakes due to the new electronic prescribing systems are simply one factor of many that complicate pharmacists job. Everyone in health care is going to make mistakes, unfortunately.
The next time you get a prescription, consider thanking your pharmacist for a job well done not for getting it done so quickly. Same goes for your doctors & nurses. Thank quality, not speed.
Pharmacist are human & make mistakes. Pharmacy miss-fills are a serious concern, but has anyone ever looked into how many mistakes pharmacist catch? As more doctor’s offices go to electronic prescribing, the number of prescriber mistakes has increased drastically. We recently had a doctor ask us to “let pharmacies know” that their computer would pick the wrong medication and asked us to “call and double check every time we see that medication,“ instead of telling his fellow doctors to fix the problem or simply hand write those scripts.
Maybe if pharmacists weren’t so busy trying to contact doctors to fix their e-script mistakes, or being pressured to get prescriptions out as fast as possible instead of as correct as possible, we could make less dispensing errors.
Until pharmacists can focus on what is most important, which is getting medication safely & correctly to our patients, be safe and check every single prescription yourself- before you take it or before you give it your child.
“DAYS after giving her 2-year-old daughter what she thought was amoxicillin, Randie Reed discovered the pink liquid was not the antibiotic after all. The one says amoxicillin, I JUST FIGURED they both said amoxicillin,“ Reed said. YOU FIGURED WRONG, RANDIE REED! PARENTAL FAIL = F-!!!
Although I agree that this mistake is inexcusable according to drugsdotcom they both can be used for ear infections. This is a wake up call as I have filled a couple prescriptions at that same location.
The bottles of some brands look very much alike
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