Medical Malpractice | InjuryBoard Cook County

Dimitria Alvarez's four-month old son died from taking over-the-counter cough and cold medicines on Oct. 8, 2001, and she has since sued the two sued two distributors of the drugs, claiming they should have known the dangers of the main ingredient and cautioned consumers.The lawsuit filed Wednesday is one of the first since Federal Drug Administration hearings last month where health experts...

A Missouri hospital has been sued by the parents of one of its patients after the 8-year old girl received the wrong medication. The girl had been prescribed israpidine but was given risperdal instead.The girl suffered brain damage and kidney damage and will eventually require a kidney transplant."Sound-alike" medications cause the potential for medication errors. This arises from the custom...

At a recent administrative law hearing for unemployment benefits, a judge ruled that a nurse's discharge was not for cause -- even though she made many errors in the care of patients under her charge -- because the errors were the result of the multiple responsibilities that had been placed on the nurse. Therefore, the judge awrded unemployment benefits that the hospital had been contesting.The...

A Houston TV station ran a segement recently on the occurrence of medication dispensing errors at local pharmacies, and the apparently lax discipline of pharamcists who make dispensing errors.In one instance, a cancer patient was prescribed medication to be taken four time per week, but was given instructions by the pharamcist to take four times daily. The cancer patient suffered permanent...

A Montana nurse admitted to a coroner's inquest that she adminstered a wrong medication to a patient who died shortly after receiving the drug. The patient came to trhe emergency room of the hospital with difficulty breathing. The doctor ordered lasix, a diuretic, to help draw out fluid that may have been contributing the respiratory problems.Instead of taking the lasix from the pharmacy, she...

An employee in a drug compounding pharmacy who was mixing a medication made an error which resulted in a drug being sent to a clinic in a form which was 10 times more potent than intended. The medication was called colchicine, which is normally used to treat gout. It was being used in the clinic to treat back pain, which is off-lbael use of the drug. The way that the medication works is that...

A Philadelphia family has filed suit against a local hospital after their father died following heart surgery. Two hours after having bypass surgery, the man had a fatal heart attack. The man's daughter, a doctor, reviewed his chart and saw that he was given an excessive amount of potassium, and she believes that this led to his death.Nurses are taught that they need to check their "R's"...

A teenage pharmacy technician filled a prescription with 10 times the dose of coumadin a customer was supposed to receive. The pharmacist on duty, charged with checking the work of the technician, failed to catch the error and dispensed the prescription to the customer.The customer suffered a massive stroke due to the overdose of coumadin. She had been suffering from Stage II breast cancer,...

Walgreen's has been named as a defendant in a lawsuit which alleges that a pharmacist provided a customer with a medication called amicar instead of the medication prescribed by his doctor, omacor. The man had just undergone a cardiac catheterization and was prescribed omacor to lower his cholesterol. Amicar is intended to control bleeding and is inappropriate for a person who has undergone a...

A Texas woman recently was given ulcer medication instead of the prenatal vitamins which her doctor had ordered. The ulcer medication had been prescribed for a woman with a similar name.After taking the ulcer medication, she began to experience severe pain and went to the emergency room. There she learned that she had a miscarriage.One of the comments in the article mentioned the hectic pace...

A recent study looking at the number of deaths from prescription drug poisoning in the United States from 1999 to 2004 found that the death rate had increased 68% relative to the previous period studied.Deaths from prescription drugs now rank second to only to motor vehicle collisions as the cause of accidental deaths in the United States.The study found that an important cause of accidental...

A Florida woman died recently of a massive overdose of dilantin while she was hospitalized. The attending physician ordered 800 milligrams of the drug, but a nurse gave her 8000 milligrams instead. Two to five grams is considered a fatal dosage.Heart failure was a cause of the patient's death. According to the Institute of Medicine, this was one of the estimated 400,000 patient deaths...

A Cleveland-area child died after receiving an improperly-mixed medication as part of her chemotherapy regimen. The actual dose was mixed by a pharmacy technician. The error was uncovered as part of an investigation which followed the child's death.The work of the pharmacy technician was being supervised by a licensed pharmacist. However, he failed to discover the medication error before...

A cancer patient died after being given 10 times the dose of chemotherapy medication ordered by his doctor. The patient was to receive 50 mg of the medication ordered by his doctor, but was instead given a 500 mg dose. Four days later, the patient died. There were a number of allegations that the hospital staff tried to cover up the error.Fortunately, the hospital disclosed the error to the...

Becky Vanderlinden was quite surprised last week when she noticed the dose instructions on the bottle of antibiotics for her toddler. The toddler received five times the dose of antibiotics that her doctor had prescribed. Vanderlinden had called the pharmacy to check the dosage and was told that it was indeed correct - but the label was wrong. "I thought, "This seems like a huge amount of...