Prescription Drug Errors & Nursing Home Abuse

Warning: Nursing home patients are victims of prescription drug mistakes

A recent British study conducted by the Department of Health suggests that unwilling nursing home residents are the victims of prescription drug errors ranging from clerical errors to life altering mistakes.

These mistakes were made by pharmacists, nursing staff, and doctors.

Researchers visited 55 residential and nursing homes over 2.5 years and surveyed 256 residents. Amazingly, the average patient takes 7 or 8 medicines.

In some cases, doctors prescribed the wrong medication or failed to consider how a newly prescribed drug would affect the existing medications. Failure of a doctor to better monitor medications could be caused by the lack of connectivity for when a patient comes back from the hospital with new drugs and that information is not disbursed timely or at all with the resident doctor.

Clerical errors such as putting the decimal in the wrong place has also caused serious to life threatening drug reactions.