Prescription Translation Errors Place Patients at Risk
According to a study, Spanish-speaking persons in the United States may be at a high risk of injuries because of prescription translation errors. Researchers at the Nemours/Alfred I. DuPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Del found that many of these errors were serious, and could lead to grave misunderstandings.
According to the researchers, most of these prescription errors occur because of problems with the software that most pharmacies use to translate prescriptions from English to Spanish. These computer programs do a barely adequate job, and the resulting translations can be full of errors.
The researchers surveyed pharmacies in the New York area, and found that four out of every five pharmacies surveyed, translated prescriptions from English to Spanish using computer programs. All the pharmacies admitted that they rechecked their translated prescriptions by using Spanish- speaking pharmacists. However, the researchers were astounded to find that even in spite of this manually checking, there were a large number of errors on the prescriptions.
Part of the problem with using a computer program to translate prescriptions is that the software translates one word at a time. When you consider each word in the translated version, you would think that the software does a pretty good job. However, when you consider an entire sentence, or a couple of lines of instructions translated from English to Spanish, the meaning in the translated version is completely different from the original version. This creates a lot of confusion, and there's plenty of scope for misunderstandings.
The researchers suggest that pharmacies hire more Spanish-speaking staff to help translate English prescriptions. Another recommendation is that Spanish-speaking patients take along English-speaking friends or relatives, to help them translate the prescription.
Scott Grossman in a New Jersey pharmacy error lawyer, representing injured victims of prescription and pharmacy errors in Monmouth, Bergen, Passaic and Ocean Counties, and across the state of New Jersey.
