Why Liquid Medications Should Be Measured in Milliliters

There are many reasons why mistakes at the pharmacy counter occur, such as miscommunication, poor prescription handwriting, confusion between similar drug names, and lack of a thorough drug review. However, one of the top causes of pharmaceutical malpractice claims involves customers getting the wrong dosage of drugs.

Because pharmacists fill many prescriptions per day, oftentimes they don’t catch mistakes made by pharmacy technicians, or sometimes they provide confusing label instructions. Whether they misread a prescription as 5 mL instead of .5 mL, or they mistakenly labeled a medication with 3.5 teaspoons instead of 3.5 mL, dosing mistakes occur frequently and can cause harm to children and adults.

Sadly, innocent children are often the victims of dosing mistakes because pharmacists and pharmacy technicians often confuse milliliters with teaspoons. When this happens, children can suffer the harmful side effects from being overdosed. Because of this danger and the fact that it occurs far more often than it should, the CDC is calling for all pharmacists and physicians to use metric units for liquid medications.

Utilizing Metric Units Could Decrease Liquid Dosing Errors

If pharmacists were no longer allowed to prescribe a liquid medication with teaspoons, the confusion between milliliters and teaspoons would be eliminated. Because dosing errors involving teaspoons occur at an alarming rate, the CDC would like to simplify the process to eliminate the confusion. By only allowing liquid doses of medication to be measured in milliliters, it would also eliminate the need for drams and other unfamiliar measures that can cause confusion. The CDC would even like to take it to the next level and have the unit of measurement included with the liquid medication prescription. This way, an individual, parent, or caregiver wouldn’t reach for the kitchen spoon and take the wrong dose.

As reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), a white paper was drafted, advising pharmacies to make the following changes:

• use milliliter as the standard measure
• provide a dosing device with the medication that corresponds to the prescribed dose
• use a zero before a decimal point for dosages of less than one

Although these tips are only recommendations and not rules, it is the hope that pharmacies will go metric and follow through with these changes to reduce unnecessary dosing mistakes. Until then, it is likely that consumers could be victims of dosing errors. To learn about pharmacy malpractice claims and your rights, please request a free copy of our book, How to Make Pharmacies Pay for Injuries Caused by Medication Errors.