Do Understaffed Pharmacies Affect Patient Safety?
Good question. Companies around the world are feeling the pain of being understaffed with overworked employees, and overworked employees can lead to more mistakes. It’s bound to happen, but how do you prevent it from happening? We put a lot of trust in our healthcare providers including our pharmacies, and, I get it, they are busy. We all are.
Dispensing errors by pharmacies can have serious consequences.
I recently had an experience when I picked up my prescription at a local pharmacy. It was a regular prescription, so I didn’t think anything about it until about day five of taking the medicine. I just happened to look at the prescription bottle and immediately noticed that my name was not on the bottle, there were no important drug facts and warnings on the bottle, the prescribing doctor was wrong, and my prescription number was incorrect. Moreover, I could tell that there was a label under the top label. I could read all information under the top label including the name and address of the person who was supposed to have received the medication, drug facts and warnings, her drug number, and drug directions. WOW!
There are several things going on here, and so many things that could have prevented my getting someone else’s prescription. Ironically enough, while my name was not on this medication anywhere, it was the medication that I take on a monthly basis. Thank goodness for that!
There are many other dispensing errors pharmacies can make besides the wrong medications and dosage including:
- entering incorrect information into the computer
- labeling errors
- failing to screen for drug interactions
- failing to counsel a patient about the medication
Let’s not let ourselves get so overworked that we are missing things and making mistakes . . . potentially deadly mistakes.
TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis can help you avoid mistakes like these.
Register for an upcoming 2-Day or 5-Day Training and learn how to investigate and fix problems like these once and for all.
If you would like to find out more about how TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis can improve performance at your company, contact me at wishoun@taproot.com a free Executive Briefing.
