Whether you go to a Walgreens pharmacy or another retail pharmacy chain, you may have been on the receiving end of a pharmacy error. While prescription mistakes can happen for many different reasons, one cause of error is the lack of communication between the customer and the pharmacist.
When a Walgreens pharmacist actually spends time consulting with a patient, he or she may catch pharmacy errors, drug mix-ups, or talk with a patient about the risks of taking both a prescription and an over-the-counter medication. When a pharmacist doesn’t provide a patient with this consultation, the pharmacist may not catch a critical error or identify how over-the-counter drugs or other prescription medications may interact with the new prescription that was filled.
Valuable Consultations
Many times pharmacies will have patients waive their rights to speak with a pharmacist, even before they know what they are signing. When patients waive their rights to counseling, they may miss valuable information about the specific drug or how that drug may interact with other medications they are already taking.
It is federal law that Walgreens pharmacies as well as all other pharmacies are required to have pharmacists counsel patients on the prescriptions they fill. However, many pharmacies get around this law by having their patients sign a small piece of paper with fine print waiving their rights to counseling. For this reason, our pharmacy error lawyers urge you not to sign anything until you get a chance to speak with the pharmacist directly.
Preventing Prescription Errors
Pharmacists should do a better job of spending time with patients and educating them about their prescriptions and if their drugs could interact with anything else they are taking. When patients get to spend time with pharmacists and get answers to their questions, many pharmacy mistakes are caught prior to patients suffering the side effects of a pharmacy error.
If you have been hurt by a negligent Walgreens pharmacy, call Kennedy Hodges, L.L.P. for a free, private case consultation at 888-526-7616 with an experienced pharmacy error attorney. Also, make sure you request a FREE copy of our report, How to Make Pharmacies Pay for Injuries Caused by Medication Errors.