Rob’s local Kroger pharmacy screwed up the prescription on his kid’s TamiFlu. Rob caught the error before any harm was done, and he’s not the confrontational type. In fact, he’s wondering whether he should just drop the whole matter. Here’s your chance to convince him otherwise.

I have a 3-month-old foster son that was just hospitalized for a few days with a fever and cough. The hospital released him with a prescription for TamiFlu at 1mL twice daily. The pharmacy (Kroger) gave me a decent sized bottle with the label reading “1 teaspoon (5mL) twice daily”. Luckily, I remembered the hospital discharge papers and only gave him 1mL. I called the pharmacy to verify that the concentration of TamiFlu was correct and I wasn’t underdosing or overdosing him at all. There was some confusion and I was told I got the correct concentration, but they accidently entered 1 tsp instead of 1mL. A standard “sorry for the mistake” was given.

My mother, a nurse, was livid and said I should go talk to the head pharmacist in person and demand some kind of a refund. (The prescription cost me 167.00. I found out later the pharmacy didn’t contact the insurance correctly and it should have been covered at 100%.) I’m going to go back and get a refund anyway since the prescription is covered, but I hate getting into face-to-face conflicts. I usually resort to emails to managers. My question is, should I even escalate this? I know that I could have seriously injured the baby had I overdosed him, but no injury was actually done. Should I just let it go?

I’ll start! Rob, everyone makes mistakes, and this was a typo and not an “oops that’s the wrong drug entirely” type of problem. But simply for the security of other customers, it seems to me that someone higher up than the pharmacist needs to know what happened.

What if this is part of a pattern of mistakes? What if the typo, as well as the insurance glitch, are signs of poor training? What if you don’t complain and the pharmacy makes a similar error with someone else who doesn’t catch the mistake in time? Yeah, that would suck.

You don’t have to go get in a fight with the pharmacist. Find out the contact info for someone higher up, and send an email similar to the one you sent us. And if nothing happens after that, you might want to find a different pharmacy that you can trust more.

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