Recovering Damages for Prescription Errors in Pennsylvania

Properly used for the right patients, prescription medications can relieve suffering while reducing the risk of heart attack, seizure, stroke or other serious medical conditions. Not every drug is the right choice for every patient, however, and both the selection and dosage of medications must be carefully matched to individual patient needs in order to achieve the clinical objective and avoid injury or death. In medical malpractice litigation related to errors in prescription drugs, careful analysis of the patient’s medical history and treatment records is necessary to answer a number of critical questions: • Is there a causal link between the patient’s injury or death and the use of a particular medication? • Did anything in the patient’s medical history indicate the inadvisability of a particular drug? • Was the patient properly instructed in the safe use of the drug, or advised about what to do if certain side effects develop? • Did other medications the patient was using indicate elevated levels of risk with the use of this drug? • If administered by a nurse or other hospital staff, was the drug used in a manner consistent with the doctor’s instructions and the manufacturer’s disclosures and warning? • Was the prescription filled as it was written, or in a different dose or even a different drug? Although prescription and medication errors often present relatively easy cases for proving liability, it is not always clear just whose mistake was responsible for the patient’s damages. The proper defendant might be the prescribing doctor, the pharmacist who filled the prescription, or the nurse who administered it to the patient. In some cases, prescription errors are related to other negligent mistakes in diagnosis or treatment, and different defendants will blame one another for the patient’s unfavorable outcome.