A UK medical negligence compensation claim solicitor deals with applications for damages against healthcare professionals for personal injury and loss. If you have suffered as a result of being wrongly prescribed in UK it is to your advantage, in order to preserve your legal right to compensation, to contact a medical negligence prescription error solicitor as soon as possible after the event that caused the injury.

Errors & Mistakes

Prescription errors can be made by the doctor prescribing the medication, by the pharmacist, and potentially by the manufacturer itself. The doctor can, first and foremost, make a prescription error by calling in or writing the wrong prescription. The doctor can be mistaken as to the correct name of the drug and might be writing a prescription for the completely wrong medication. The medication can be correct, but the dose can be wrong. For example, the doctor can write a prescription for Lasix 80 milligrams, when he or she really means Lasix 20 milligrams. This mistake can cause the patient to suffer unintended side effects.

Similar Names

The doctor can call in a prescription that is misunderstood by the pharmacist or can write a prescription that is practically illegible, resulting in prescription errors. For example, when the drug Losec came out, too many pharmacists misheard the doctor say “Lasix” and this resulted in many medication errors. After too many errors were noted, the manufacturer came out and decided to call the drug Prilosec instead so that the similarity in names could not happen at all. This resulted in fewer mistakes in the pharmacy which could have harmed the patient.

Illegible Writing

The doctor can also write out an illegible prescription or one that can be misinterpreted by the pharmacist or pharmacy technician. The drug itself could be misread or the dosage could be misunderstood by the technicians at the pharmacy so that the wrong drug and the wrong dosages are passed onto the patient.

Drug Allergy

The pharmacist or the doctor may fail to pick up on a drug allergy. The patient may be allergic to penicillin, for example, and the doctor may prescribe amoxicillin, which is a penicillin-like drug that causes the patient an identical allergy to the penicillin allergy. There are a lot of drugs that have related allergies so the doctor and pharmacist must be aware of the cross-reactivity of drugs when it comes to allergic reactions. There can also be drug-drug interactions that mostly are the responsibility of the pharmacist to detect as different doctors can prescribe medications, but the pharmacist should be familiar with all the drugs a patient is taking as well as all the various drug-drug interactions.

Failed Monitoring

Some medications require careful monitoring that is the responsibility of the doctor to order and keep track of. One example of these includes patients taking warfarin or Coumadin. They need regular checks  to make sure the blood isn’t too thick or isn’t too thin. In the beginning, blood tests may need to be done several times a week until the dose stabilizes. Testing also needs to be done for patients on Lithium, who need regular kidney function studies done as well as regular thyroid function studies. These areas of the body can be damaged by long term lithium use so that, approximately every six months, the doctor should be checking the TSH, creatinine, and BUN level. People on statin medication should also have liver function tests performed before starting the drug. Failure to do this could indicate medical negligence.

Pharmacist Errors

The pharmacy can easily make a mistake and give the wrong medication or the wrong dose just by reaching for the wrong bottle or putting the wrong label on the medication. This can have far-reaching implications for pharmacists who mistakenly give a bottle of a medication the patient is allergic to or a medication that has an adverse side effect on the patient’s health. It also prevents the patient from getting a medication that he or she needs.

Product Liability

The manufacturer can make a bad batch of medications that isn’t potent enough or contains unhealthy impurities. Hopefully, quality control at laboratories that make medications can detect these kinds of issues.

Qualified Legal Advice

Specialist UK medical negligence compensation solicitors offer free impartial advice on clinical compensation claims. In most cases solicitors are able to deal with all of the legal work at no cost to you. If you would like free advice with no further obligation use the contract a specialist lawyer who will tell you how best to proceed to protect your right to claim compensation for personal injury.