New Law May Reduce Prescription Mistakes

[The Straight Story]

New Law May Reduce Prescription Mistakes

WESTERVILLE, Ohio — A new state law requires those filling your prescriptions to get training, testing and licensing to prevent mistakes that killed a two-year-old girl.

Emily's Law is named for Emily Jerry, a northeast Ohio child who died three years ago from an incorrect dose of chemotherapy, 10TV's Kevin Landers reported.

Governor Ted Strickland is expected to sign the bill into law Wednesday.

The new law also requires criminal background checks for pharmacy technicians, who fill 90 percent of medications in most pharmacies.

The increasing demands for prescription drugs and the need for pharmacies to cut costs mean that licensed pharmacists who regularly fill prescriptions have become a rarity. Pharmacy technicians have taken over that role in the health system.

http://www.10tv.com/live/content/local/stories/2009/01/07/emily.html?sid=102

[customerserviceguy]

1. How is this going to help people at drugstores?

I did a little research myself, and found this:

http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2009/01/whatever_happened_to_sales_for.html

Important excerpts:

"On her birthday, Feb. 26, 2006, Emily Jerry, the daughter of Kelly and Chris Jerry, went to Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital for a final chemotherapy treatment for her cancer, which had all but disappeared. The parents and the child's doctor thought that the final treatment would ensure that the cancer was destroyed.

Instead, the child screamed in agony and then slipped into a coma after pharmaceutical technician Katie Dudash prepared her intravenous treatment with a 23 percent saline solution instead of a typical mix of less than 1 percent, according to the Ohio State Board of Pharmacy.

Dudash told her supervisor, pharmacist Eric Cropp, she felt something was wrong with the mixture, but he approved it anyway, according to testimony at an Ohio Pharmacy Board hearing in April 2007.

The child died several days later.

Cropp lost his pharmacist license and is awaiting trial on the pair of third-degree felonies and faces a maximum of five years in prison if convicted."

Ok, this happened in a hospital, not a drugstore. If they want to have testing and certification for people working in places where you actually have to mix things up, then limit it to that. Also, this was a pharmacy tech, who was directed wrongly by a pharmacist. Some licensing is going to make a tech stand up a little taller and straighter to tell off a full-fledged pharmacist? I don't think so.

This is just another feel-good law named after a pretty, dead white child. You don't need an advanced degree to count pills from the big bottle to the little bottle, and any additional needless expense you put pharmacies through just speeds the day when ALL of the pills get counted from the big bottle to the little bottle at faraway places and mailed to you. Some of them might even be in China.