Understaffed Pharmacies, Overworked Employees Causing Prescription Errors Exposed by USA Today
March 7th, 2025By Lauren Jones, The Bowling Law Firm Paralegal –
A USA TODAY article published in October 2023 brings attention to dangerous pharmacy conditions that have led to an exponential surge in pharmacy errors.
According to USA TODAY, in the post-COVID era, chain pharmacies are understaffed but the workload is higher than ever before.
Filling an average of 500 prescriptions each day, answering phones, consulting with customers, administering vaccines, and COVID testing are just some of the tasks that fall on a pharmacy’s skeleton crew.
Even worse, “solo shifts” are common. Burnt out employees can barely keep up, inevitably cutting corners.
Former Walgreens pharmacist Bled Tanoe told USA TODAY that the push from corporate to hit quotas has created an environment where, “the incidents of error are multiplied by infinity.”
But pharmacists are not required to report medication errors to any federal agencies. Many pharmacies track errors internally, but don’t share that information with the public.
CVS and Walgreens declined to share their medication error data with USA TODAY. Although pharmacies are not disclosing their errors, estimates put the number at 54 million dispensing errors per year. Around 2.3 million of those could be potentially harmful.
The Bowling Law Firm, which focuses on handling pharmacy error cases, has become painfully aware that there are rising numbers of misfilled prescriptions causing injuries and illnesses.
As Senior Partner David Bowling explains, “People instinctively trust their pharmacies to act professionally and competently and fill their prescriptions properly. But with increased frequency, we have clients who have been given the wrong medicine, or the wrong dose of medicine, or even other patients’ medicine. And they sustain sickness and injury from taking a medication that was not intended for them, and lose the benefits of obtaining the correct medications to take.”
Until changes are made to improve the work environment for pharmacy employees, a high level of medication errors will continue.
The USA TODAY article focused on the national chain and “big box” pharmacy operations, and this is where The Bowling Law Firm sees the biggest problem as well.
As David Bowling observes, “We occasionally are hired by customers of mom-and-pop pharmacies which fill prescriptions improperly, but it is much more common that we get retained because the client has been injured due to an error committed by one of the national chains. Our advice to the public is that when you get your prescriptions filled at CVS Pharmacy, Walgreens Pharmacy, Rite Aid Pharmacy, Sam’s Club or Costco, check to make sure that the medication is the right one before you take it.”
If you feel that you have suffered from a pharmacy error, contact The Bowling Law Firm to consult with one of our attorneys.
