Medication Error Causing Longer Illness For You?

If you or your family went to see a doctor and it took longer to recover or had complications, there is a chance that you were victim of medication error. Medication error is so prevalent that no one would escape from it. And you would have thought the complication which happened because of medication error was just a manifestation of illness you or your family had. It is estimated that around 5 million injuries occur in India due to all medical errors. USA loses more than INR 1.3 lakh crore every year because of avoidable medical errors. Imagine how big will this be in India given shortcomings of regulations and reinforcement in India than in the USA.

Let me share the prevalence of medication errors by sharing an incident last year. I only had 3 doctor visits last year for whole family. One of them was for my son. My son had some scary illness called PSGN (Post-streptococcal glomerulo-nephritis). We were scared because there was blood in urine for almost 2 weeks. It was not so serious as it heals itself. We had good doctor who was our regular pediatrician. Doctor prescribed some antibiotics and stomach soother. We collected our medications from pharmacist and came back home.



One good thing I did was to take picture of my prescription on Health-PIE Digital Nurse App. I got the digital prescription immediately on the health App as well on text SMS. And I compared the medicine I had in hand and what’s written on prescription via digital prescription. And one of the medicine did not match. I called the Health-PIE team on 9739300031 to ask about the same. They told me that pharmacist dispensed a wrong medicine which is is an adult medicine and 10X higher dosage. This medicine should not have been given to the kid.

I called my doctor and confirmed the same and she agreed that pharmacist dispensed a wrong medicine. I was fortunate to avoid the medication error disaster. Unfortunately most of us cannot even detect a medication error because we do not understand doctor’s handwriting on prescription. Any complication happening because of this medication error or simply not recovering as expected could be because of medication error but most of us are not aware unless we are empowered with technology like Health-PIE App.

It is high time that we become vigilant about this menace which is even worse than illness itself. You can recover quicker and safely if you are vigilant and save yourself all the pain and some extra healthy days. So next time when you see a doctor, ensure that you double check your medicines with the prescription record. If you do not understand doctor’s handwriting then feel free to use Health-PIE App or any other App or see a doctor again to double check that you have the right medicines.

Stay healthy and take care!