I am a pharmacist with Walgreens.

Here is the main contributing factor to the above incident….Walgreens refuses to
give us enough help in the pharmacy! They call it budgeting.

Look at where you shop—you’ll see the pharmacist ringing on the register instead of
filling rx’s. You’ll see the pharmacist at the drive-through because there’s not enough
help. We have to answer the phone about the price of cigarettes and milk. And on and on.

With constant interruptions, what can Walgreens expect? You wouldn’t expect a Doctor
doing an exam to stop and go to the front desk, or even answer the phone. Why should
a Phamacist be treated any differently? His work is just as critical.

Pharmacists do a great job considering all the forced distractions they have, but the more interruptions they have, the more mistakes will happen!! GET US SOME MORE HELP!!!

I am a pediatrician and, while the pharmacy obviously made a serious error, the physician involved is not without fault. Three month olds do not get sinus infections and the medicine prescribed:

1. Does not work for infants as documented in numerous studies
2. Has not been used by most pediatricians for years in this age group.
3. Was specifically targeted to be removed from use for all children under age 2 by the FDA and American Academy of Pediatrics because of lack of effectiveness and numerous cases of life threatening side effects.

Walgreens almost killed my dad with the WRONG medication. They gave him Ambien (sleep med) instead of gout meds. He wanted to end the pain so he popped the medication in the parking lot. He began driving my mother to go do her grocery shopping and nearly hit parked cars! I get a call from my mother (who doesnt drive) at the grocery store telling me what just happened. It was a double dose so I had to rush him to the emergency room to see if he needed his stomache pumped (luckily he did not). To “make things right” we got a $20 gift card. I can not even imagine how the parents of this infant feels! Check your meds people- very scary things can happen if you don’t!

I am a pharmacist with RiteAid and the mother of a 4 month old daughter. There is never an excuse for an error and many of us go home at night and lie awake reliving the day’s events praying we did not make a single mistake. A single prescription has at least twelve opportunities for error. (Wrong date/patient/medication/strength/directions/quantity/prescriber - and that’s just what goes on the label. We also must evaluate appropriate dosage/medication allergies/ potential for drug interactions. Finally, we have to make sure the right pill is placed in the bottle and the right bottle put into the right bag.) Multiply that by an average of about 200 prescriptions filled/day and I basically had 2400 opportunities for a mistake. Meanwhile, many pharmacy patrons have adopted a fast food mentality regarding the filling of prescriptions and make their displeasure known if asked to wait more than fifteen minutes. It is like a perfect storm for errors.

I looked at the copy of the rx in the local news story and although fuzzy - it appears the prescription does say 1/4 teaspoonful (or maybe dropperful?). It definitely doesn’t appear to say 1/4 milliliter. Computer generated rxs are so much easier to read and should be made mandatory - then all we would have to struggle with is the physician’s signature.

My heart goes out to all parties involved. I do applaud the pharmacist for discovering the error and calling the parents relatively quickly which avoided an even more devastating outcome. As a mother and a pharmacist - this incident is the stuff of nightmares for me.

I have been writing an informative, patient empowering newsletter, for patients and their families, about medical horrors in Canada since May 2006, which was approx. one year before I saw Michael Moore’s biased movie “Sicko”. Mr. Moore’s film conveniently ignored/overlooked a myriad of atrocious abuses of Canada’s patient/victim population by the Canadian medical establishment. I will post approx. 13 of those letters, over the next few days, which will expose the various ways in which Canadian hospitals/medical professionals kill approx. 36,000 Canadian patient/victims by medical errors, negligence, misdiagnosis, poor hospital hygiene, deadly hospital “super bugs” etc. Canadian patient/victims, their families and the Canadian public have been “whipped into submission” (by “medical” smoke & mirrors”, whitewash, spin and lies) to such an extent that they have unwittinglly become “good little victims” for Canada’s medical establishment. Unlike their counterparts in the U.S., Canadian patient/victims almost never get the compensation/justice that is owed to them by the hospitals/medical professionals who hurt, injured, maimed or killed them.

Everyone should learn from this and take a little responsibility for themselves and their children and check that your getting the right medication and dose, after all, mistakes happen, we are all humans that make mistakes. Doctors, pharmacists,hospitals, patients…all human…this is not a perfect world. This kind of MISTAKE can distroy a family but also the doctors or pharmacists life as well. Thank God the baby was alright and there is no perminent side affects, that should be the focus here…count your blessings!!!

As was pointed out on “White Coat, Black Art” (CBC Radio,Canada), Canadian hospitals do not operate in a “culture of safety”. When Canadian patient/victims are sickened, injured, maimed or killed by a myriad of hospitals wrongdoings (medical errors, poor hospital hygiene, deadly “super bugs” etc.), there is little or no accountability for those tragedies. Hospitals/medical professionals are not presently required to tell the truth/disclose any and all wrongdoings on their part that led to those tragedies. Instead of a “culture of safety”, what we have in Canadian hospitals is a “culture of blaming the victim”, or the family of the victim, the hospital just injured, maimed or killed by medical errors, misdiagnosis, deadly hospital “super bugs” etc. The result is an atrociously high number ( 36,000 ) of patient/victims killed by our Canadian hospitals every year and a very small number of medical malpractice law suits because patient/victims and their families are kept in the dark about what really happened to them. The above numbers mean that Canadian hospitals kill approx. 100 ( one hundred ) patient/victims every day. That is a horrifinglly high number ( for a country of only thirty two million people ) and is much higher, per capita, than is the case in many other wealthy, industrialized countries. This lack of medical errors “disclosure” prevents our Canadian patient/victims from getting the compensation/justice that is rightfully owed to them. A sad example of this heartless and cruel ” blaming the victim ” hospital practice was the “treatment” received by the mother of a child injured, by the hospital, during delivery at Victoria Hospital in London, Ontario, Canada. The negligence of some medical staff at Victoria Hospital caused CEREBRAL PALSY in the just born child. So what did the hospital do ?, it blamed the mother of that child, of course, by cruelly telling her that she caused the cerebral palsy in her just born child due to a ” virus ” in her womb. Thankfully, this cruelly victimized mother of a child injured by Victoria Hospital won a $ 5.3 million dollar lawsuit against that hospital. Similar horrific scenarios are repeated in Canadian hospitals thousands of times every year and most of those patient/victims never get the compensation/justice that is rightfully owed to them. This is because hospitals/medical professionals in Canada will not hesitate to cover up, blame the victim or the family of the victim, give out misleading or even false information in medical records, ” doctor ” the records, or in any other way try to ” wash their hands ” of the tragedy they caused. All in an attempt to avoid accountability/responsibility for their own wrongdoing and to prevent their patient/victims from ever getting the compensation/justice they deserve. Signed, Mark Mager, of London, Ontario, Canada.