Can a Pharmacist be Sued for Negligence?

A pharmacist plays an essential role in the health care system of any country. Since they are assigned to dispense medicine to patients, their errors may have life-threatening or life-altering outcomes. Here are a few occasions when a pharmacist can be held liable for professional malpractice and negligence and where a Philadelphia, PA medical malpractice lawyer fits into this picture. 

Legal duties of a pharmacist

In the current health care system, a pharmacist’s task can be much more than merely counting out pills, and handing them over to the patient with his/her prescription.

The specific responsibilities of pharmacists to patients remain a matter of law, with those responsibilities varying from one state to the other. Depending on the law of your state, a pharmacist can be liable for the additional duties other than handing out prescription drugs. For instance….

• Reviewing prescription in accordance with the past medical history of patients
• Informing the patient as to the probable side effects of the medication
• Screening several prescriptions from various health care providers to ensure that they may be taken together
• Keeping as well referring to the patient’s medical history
• Willingness to discuss a patient’s medication, particularly with reference to Medicaid patients

Let’s look at the above in more detail.

Dispensing the wrong medication

Dispensing the wrong medicine can never be acceptable and you do not need a Pennsylvania medical malpractice attorney to know this, whether it is the wrong medication, or wrong strength of the medication. A pharmacist who turns aside from these tasks is inviting a medical malpractice lawsuit for negligence.

Even if a medication is mislabeled by its manufacturer, the pharmacist should have found out the error. Therefore, if a medication does not look right, the pharmacist should have caught the manufacturer’s or doctor’s mistake.

You may have gone through life thinking you would never need a lawyer, certainly not a Philadelphia medical malpractice one! Then all of a sudden you have to be rushed to the hospital after taking some prescription pills. What happened?! Your medical report will explain this but you need legal help to send a message that a pharmacist has some serious responsibilities. Louis Podel is one of the finest lawyers in this area. His law firm can be seen right here: http://louispodel.com/. You deserve to be compensated. You should not have to pay those medical bills, your health has been compromised, and you just lost a lot of time.

Failure to consider patient’s medical history

This is particularly relevant, if the pharmacist is employed in a state that mandates that pharmacists take the medical history of patient into account while dispensing medication.

For instance, if the pharmacy’s records reveal that a patient is severely allergic to a specific medication, the pharmacist has the duty to decline the dispensation of that medicine to the patient. What he or she should really have done is contact the patient’s doctor or advise the patient to return to see the doctor and seek his counsel again. If any pharmacist is unable to do any one of these things, and dispense the medication anyway, to the patient, he or she can be held liable for negligence, as any Philadelphia, PA medical malpractice lawyers will tell you.

Failure in screening multiple prescriptions

Sometimes, a patient has already approached a pharmacist with three prescriptions from different doctors. Later the same patient appears before the pharmacist with another prescription from a fourth doctor. If the native state of the pharmacist requires that he/she should review all the four prescriptions to ensure that the patient can take the fourth prescription safely, in the light of the first three prescriptions, he must do so. In fact, if the pharmacist fails to screen several prescriptions they may be found negligent.

Under the above circumstances, if you feel you are a victim of the misplaced actions of a pharmacist, you can file a lawsuit against the perpetrator. For this, you would need the active assistance of a stellar and hardworking Pennsylvania medical malpractice lawyer. One of the best in Eastern Pennsylvania is Louis Podel. He knows this arena like you know your own bedroom. He knows how to attack the other side and he knows how to extract impressive settlements without having to go to court. But if he and his law firm have to go court, they know how to win there too!