Incorrectly administered medicine and medical negligence

Anyone who has been treated in hospital for a medical condition understands that it can be a very stressful and upsetting time. Unfortunately, this experience can be made even worse if the person suffers the effects of medical negligence during their stay.

Medical professionals are often extremely busy and have a lot of patients to see in their day. Many are treated with the attention and consideration that is expected of nurses and doctors and go on to make a speedy recovery. However, mistakes can be made when so many people are being treated and some may receive inadequate treatment that may worsen their condition or cause them further personal injury.

Personal injury caused by medication
One way in which medical negligence may occur is during the administering of medicine. Nearly every person who is admitted to hospital is given medicine in some form and the capacity for error is huge.

A number of people have suffered personal injury and others have died as a result of the wrong medicine being administered. This can easily happen when instructions are being passed between doctors or nurses and they are misinterpreted, resulting in one person being given someone else's medicine. This kind of medical negligence can also occur through administrative errors, such as if a syringe is mislabelled with another patient's name.

Another way in which a patient may be injured by medication is when too much is administered to them. Many drugs are very potent and may cause very serious personal injury if given in excessive quantity. Unfortunately, it is relatively common for this to occur in hospitals, especially if instructions are not written clearly or if directions for administering medicine are misheard.

Whilst delivering too much medicine to an individual may result in personal injury. An insufficient dose may mean that the person suffers unnecessarily and may even die if this occurs in an emergency situation. Miscommunication or a simple mistake when measuring a dose may be the cause of under-treating a patient.

Another potentially very serious incident of medical negligence can occur if a person is given a medicine to which they are known to be allergic. There have been some notable cases of patients being injected with penicillin despite the fact that their medical notes clearly showed that they were allergic, resulting in serious and sometimes fatal anaphylactic reactions.

The final way in which medicine may be harmful to the patient is if it is not administered correctly. Most medicines are only suitable to be delivered in a certain way, such as orally or intravenously. There have been numerous personal injury cases that have come about as a result of incorrect administering and the most serious centre on instances when injections have mistakenly been made into the spine instead of a vein.

Claiming medical negligence compensation
YouClaim offers a friendly, understanding approach to making a medical negligence claim and has been central to helping thousands of people get the personal injury compensation to which they were entitled.

If you have suffered an injury as a result of drugs being incorrectly administered to you or you have been injured by any other kind of medical negligence, we may well be able to help.

We know that starting legal action can seem daunting, especially following illness or injury and a hospital stay, which is why we make it as straightforward as possible to get medical negligence compensation. Our claims process is very easy and we only use plain English when discussing your claim with you because we know that legal jargon can be confusing. Read more about the medical negligence claim process.

Our panel of personal injury solicitors have extensive experience in handling medical negligence claims and are considered to be some of the finest in the UK. You can be totally confident of their skill and specialist knowledge in this area of personal injury law, which is reflected in their superb success rate. Read more about our medical negligence solicitors.

If you would like to start a compensation claim today or you have some legal questions regarding medical negligence, please telephone 0800 10 757 95 or fill in an online claim form.