Medical Error Lawyers in Merrillville, Gary and Crown Point, IN
Resourceful advocates fight for full and fair compensation
Modern medicine has produced wondrous benefits. Unfortunately, human error can prevent patients from enjoying the advantages and instead can cause great harm. For more than 30 years, Marshall P. Whalley & Associates, PC has fought for injured patients. Our medical malpractice attorneys litigate cases involving medication errors or sloppy use of medical records resulting in injury to patients. Our firm has the resources to thoroughly investigate isolated incidents and systemic failures to identify the parties responsible for the harm and hold them accountable.
How do medication errors occur?
Whether you receive medication in a hospital, nursing home setting, or purchase prescriptions from your own pharmacist, you rely on numerous people, from the ordering physician to the dispenser of the drugs. Each person in that chain must perform at a professional standard, adhering to necessary protocols to prevent errors and patient injury.
- Prescribing physician error — The doctor who prescribes the medication may order the wrong drug or dosage for the patient’s condition or fail to check the patient’s medical history for dangerous interactions with other prescribed meds. A prescribing physician may also write so illegibly that the pharmacist misinterprets the order and fills a prescription for the wrong drug or dosage.
- Pharmacist error — An inattentive pharmacist can fill the order with the wrong pills or switch one patient’s order with another. Under time pressure, a pharmacist might guess at what the doctor’s poor handwriting means without calling the doctor to confirm. The pharmacist might also fail to check the customer’s record for dangerous interactions with other prescriptions or fail to label the bottle with the appropriate warnings.
- Nurse error — In a hospital or nursing home setting, a nurse dispensing drugs might get patients mixed up, misread a patient’s chart, mark a medicine as dispensed when the patient did not get it or administer a drug without marking it as dispensed on the chart. Confusion from poor record-keeping can cause a patient to miss a dose, receive doses too far apart or too close in time, get the wrong medicine, or get the wrong dosage.
- Defective drugs — Many drugs, especially cancer medications derived from blood products, are highly perishable. Manufacturers’ errors and problems with packaging, transport and storage can render drugs inert and ineffective.
The medication error attorneys at Marshall P. Whalley & Associates thoroughly investigate your case to determine the cause of the error and the parties at fault.
Medical records’ errors can have serious consequences
A detailed medical history is often the key to treating a patient successfully, and accurate medical records are essential to assessing that treatment. But when healthcare providers fail to refer to a patient’s records or make mistakes and omissions when updating records, preventable errors occur and patients suffer.
Contact our medical malpractice attorneys for harm caused by medication errors
If you or a loved one has been harmed because of a medication or medical records’ error, speak with a knowledgeable medical malpractice attorney. To schedule a free consultation, call Marshall P. Whalley & Associates, PC at 219.769.2900 or contact our Crown Point office online.
