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Rx Errors More Common Early in the Month

January 18, 2005
Prescriptions filled at the first of the month can be fatal, according to a new study. Researchers found that deaths associated with prescription errors are as much as 25 percent higher during the first few days of the month.

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• Consumer Complaints

Researchers writing in the journal Pharmacotherapy studied U.S. death certificates from 1979 through 2000. Of the 131,952 deaths relating to fatal drug poisoning accidents, researchers found:

&149; Some 96.8 percent of the deaths resulted from prescription errors including the wrong drug or an incorrect dosage.
• Only 3.2 percent of the deaths resulted from adverse effects of a drug that was correctly filled.

The study also examined the correlation between medication error rates and pharmacists' workloads.

Researchers suspect that more prescriptions requests are received by pharmacists in the first few days of the month because most people receive their payments from Social Security, welfare and other government-assistance programs at that time.

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