A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to work with first year University of Manitoba pharmacy students. It was really interesting.
My job was to role play 6 different characters - one per student. One of the roles was an elderly woman who brings her prescription to the pharmacist - the pharmacist has to discover on his/her own that she has only been taking 1/2 a pill instead of a whole pill. Her dr. has prescribed a stronger dose thinking that she's not getting enough. Thank goodness for our pharmacists.
A second character was one who continually is shorted on her meds. She comes storming back to her pharmacy to pick up the 5 pills she was supposed to get but didn't.
Here's a timely article by CTV Med News
New Study Pinpoints Prescription Error Problems
CTV.ca News Staff
Every day, pharmacists find errors on physician prescriptions; most are corrected and quickly forgotten. Now a new study is counting those errors -- and the results are surprising.
Under a unique program, pharmacists in Nova Scotia are now tracking and reporting what they call "near hits" - those mistakes that patients never hear about but ones that -- had they not been caught -- could have sent the wrong medication or the wrong dose to a patient.
The ongoing study recruited 13 pharmacies across Nova Scotia, asking workers there to keep track of the errors and near-errors they encounter. They were then asked to report the errors anonymously using an online reporting tool.
In just eight months, the pharmacists at the 13 drug stores have reported 813 potential medication errors.
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