Charfoos & Christensen: Walgreen Drug Prescription Error Injures Michigan Citizen

10 February 2006

On February 7, 2006, attorneys for Michael and Norma Wells filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Michigan against Walgreen Company/The Prentice-Hall Corporation System, Inc. for a gross prescription error that has caused injury to Milford Village residents, Michael and Norma Wells.

A recent study of non-hospital based pharmacy errors published by Betsy Flynn, professor from Auburn University, estimates that American Pharmacists make approximately 56 million prescription errors a year. The errors include dispensing the wrong drug or dispensing the wrong dosage of the prescribed drug. A study by the American Institutes of Medicine published in 1999, concluded that 48,000 to 99,000 people die each year in America due to medical errors. A second study concluded that 1.3 million people a year are injured by medication errors alone. Because a large number of these errors are undiscovered or go unreported, the 1.3 million injured people per year is probably on the very low side.

Michigan's citizens count on pharmacists to correctly fill prescriptions. Few citizens have access to pharmacy research information, especially in this day and age of look-alike drug names and generic equivalence.

"When pharmacies make mistakes, their owners should step forward and apologize," said J. Douglas Peters, the Detroit attorney representing the Wells family. "Too many people die or suffer injuries from prescription errors, and companies as profit driven as Walgreen Drugs should be especially vigilant. The chain pharmacies are squeezing their pharmacists to fill excessive numbers of prescriptions and accuracy gets lost in the name of profits," said Mr. Peters.

"I am bringing this lawsuit to ensure that chain pharmacies such as Walgreen Drugs pay attention to the powerful drugs they are giving to their customers. I was fortunate enough to have lived through their error, but the next citizen might not be so lucky. If they had shown responsibility for their error and treated me with some respect after committing this error, I would not have filed this lawsuit," said Michael Wells, the plaintiff in this case from Milford Village in Oakland County. "Sometimes it takes a lawsuit to get a big company like Walgreen Drugs to pay attention and care for the patient as much as it cares for its corporate bottom line."

Source: prnewswire

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