Jan 10, 2008 9:27 pm US/Central
Local CVS Makes Another Prescription Mistake
DUNCANVILLE (CBS 11 / TXA 21) ―
It was a mistake that could have had very serious consequences.
A pregnant mother in Duncanville was given more than double the prescribed dose of a blood thinning medication by a CVS pharmacist. Now she's sharing her story to warn others.
Candace Martinez is expecting her third child in May. She has a history of blood clots, so her doctor prescribed the blood thinner Lovenox.
She injected the first dose on Monday. The next day, her mother, a retired nurse, started to give her the second dose - and stopped.
"When she looked at the vile, she says, 'This is an awful lot of medicine for you,'" Martinez said.
Her maternal and medical hunches were right. The pharmacist at CVS in Duncanville had mistakenly given her 100 milligrams of the drug, instead of the 40 milligrams prescribed. The amount was two and a half times the proper dosage.
"If I would have just continued on, I could have lost the baby. I could not be here, could really hurt myself," she said. "I have two other children that I need to worry about too, and this one."
She said the pharmacist apologized profusely and delivered the correct dose to her home.
CVS Spokesperson Mike DeAngelis issued this statement to CBS 11 News:
"The health and safety of our customers is our highest priority and we have extended our sincere apologies to Candace Martinez.
While the medication and strength dispensed by the pharmacy was correct, based on our preliminary investigation, it appears that the pharmacy dispensed it in a different quantity than was prescribed and did not alert the patient to this change. As soon as we learned about this incident, we apologized to Ms. Martinez and delivered the correct supply to her at home. We are continuing to investigate this incident and will take any steps necessary to prevent a future occurrence.
Our pharmacies are required to follow a comprehensive quality assurance process to enhance patient safety. We take any error extremely seriously and even a single incident is unacceptable to us. We have industry-leading pharmacy systems and processes and continue to invest in improvements designed to enhance the accuracy of the prescription filling process.
We recognize that any process involving people is not immune from the possibility of error or deviation from procedural controls, which is why we remain committed to continually improving quality measures to help ensure our pharmacists fill prescriptions safely and accurately.
We again extend our sincere apologize to Ms. Martinez."
To Martinez, that isn't enough.
"You put your trust in your pharmacy, and you don't know what could happen," she said. "So it's really scary, especially not knowing what it has done or could have done."
Martinez says she has a doctor's appointment on Monday to make sure she didn't suffer any adverse health effects from the error.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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