Medication Errors

Medication errors occur in hospital one out of every five times a dose is given. This results in over 1.3 million patients being injured each year and 7,000 more dying needlessly.

Common Cases

• A hospital nurse gives the wrong or too much medicine.
• A pharmacy puts the wrong medicine in the bottle or misreads the order.
• A doctor’s hand-writing is so bad that it results in a prescription that is misread.
  

Actual Case:
$1.375M awarded in February 2002 in Virginia.

The Case:
Over-prescription of Methadone and Xanax led to respiratory arrest, hypoxia and other ailments.

The details:
Plaintiff underwent a coronary artery bypass graft at defendant hospital. Plaintiff, who had a prior history of drug addiction, was on Methadone maintenance therapy. Following his surgery, he was placed on Dilaudid patient-controlled anesthesia, Methadone for pain, and Xanax to control his anxiety, all central nervous system depressants.

The next day, a nurse practitioner tripled plaintiff's Methadone medication and increased his Xanax six-fold after plaintiff complained of being in pain. Plaintiff subsequently became lethargic and was "totally unarousable". It took defendants over an hour to recognize the problem and only after plaintiff went into respiratory arrest.

Two hours later, plaintiff again went into respiratory arrest and was intubated. Subsequently, he was diagnosed with significant cognitive deficits. Plaintiff alleged that defendants should not have increased medication to the extent they did, that the prescription of Schedule II and Schedule III controlled substances by a nurse practitioner was a violation of Virginia law, that the defendants failed to adequately monitor plaintiff's condition and that the defendants failed to timely reverse the effects of the narcotic medications.

According to the Metro Verdicts Monthly, this action settled for $1,375,000.