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How might a medication error impact your fertility services?

On Behalf of | Jan 14, 2022 | Fertility, IVF |

When undergoing services for fertility, clients and their families often face a complex process. Unfortunately, mistakes and negligence can occur at any stage of this process, including the administration of medication. What should clients know about medical errors and the impact that they can have on their family?

How common are medication errors in fertility services?

When you seek services for fertility, those services may involve several different medications with sometimes changing dosage instructions. The complexity of the medication administration means that mistakes could occur in a variety of different steps during the process, and all too often do.

In fact, one study on medication management in fertility services notes that medication errors occur in between 3 and 15 percent of persons undergoing invitro fertilization.

What forms can medication errors take?

Medication errors in fertility services can come in many different forms, including:

  • Prescribing the wrong medication or dosage
  • Mislabeling medication or failing to include appropriate warnings
  • Wrong doses or missed doses
  • Communicating a prescription orally or with poor handwriting, resulting in delivery of the incorrect medication with a similar name or an incorrect dosage
  • Failure to identify potential drug interactions

Any of these errors could lower the client’s chance of conceiving, even lowering that chance to as little as 0 percent, potentially leading clients to undergo additional costly treatment. Not only can these medication errors impact the effectiveness of fertility treatment, they also have the potential to lead to adverse reactions that impact the client’s health.

When these mistakes happen, they can leave families wondering whether the medication error was the reason they were unable to welcome a child into their family. However, clients may be able to hold fertility service providers responsible for their errors.