Allocation of Responsibility for Medication Errors

Abstract

This study was designed to assess perceptions of responsibility for consumer safety while using prescription medication. Twenty-five university students were presented with four scenarios depicting an adverse outcome due to negligence involving the administration of a prescription medication. Responsibility could be assigned to the physician, the pharmacist, or the consumer (patient). Scenarios were framed either with no information regarding who committed the error, a physician error, or a patient error. The consumer was given significantly more responsibility overall, mean = 54.59 percent for consumer, compared to 34.48 percent for physician. The percent responsibility allocated to the pharmacist was not a focus of this study as its mean allocation was small, mean = 10.92, and did not vary with experimental manipulations. The shift in responsibility assigned to the consumer when the scenario highlighted consumer error was significantly greater than the corresponding shift in responsibility assigned to the physician in the physician condition.