Minnesota Family Says CVS Gave Them Wrong Prescription, Expired Medication

A Minnesota mother says a local CVS gave two of her young children incorrectly labeled or expired prescriptions at different times.

Vanessa Gilbertson told KMSP: “It’s like my trust is completely gone.”

In June 2015, the mother of three took a trip to the CVS in Delano to fill a prescription for her 7-year-old daughter, Alyssa, who had an ear infection.

“The manufacturer’s label said that it was amoxicillin but the label CVS put on it was ibuprofen,” Gilbertson said.

By chance, Gilbertson noticed the label and called about the mistake right in the nick of time.

“I would have been giving her double doses of that the whole time,” she said.

The drug store’s pharmacist apologized to Gilbertson for the mistake and fixed the problem. Then, in mid-July, the same CVS pharmacy reportedly made another mistake with the family’s medications, Mad World News reported.

The second time it happened, Gilbertson was filling a prescription for her 5-month-old daughter suffering from a severe bout of gastroesophageal reflux disease. 

The mother-of-three quickly realized there was a problem when she gave her daughter several doses of the medicine and saw no improvement in her child’s health. After nine doses she witnessed her daughter’s symptoms reappearing.

“She’s crying, not sleeping and vomiting,” she said.

That’s when Gilbertson saw that the medication had expired in June, KMSP reported.

“My first thought was that this was just insane that this happened again,” she added.

CVS has since issued a remorseful statement to the family. 

Mike DeAngelis of CVS Public Relations said: 

We sincerely apologize to Ms. Gilbertson. Her children’s prescriptions were corrected as soon as we learned of these incidents and our pharmacy supervisor has personally apologized to her.  The health and safety of our customers is our number one priority and we have comprehensive policies and procedures in place to ensure prescription safety. Prescription errors are a very rare occurrence, but if one does occur we determine what happened in order to prevent it from occurring again. We have taken corrective action at the pharmacy and remain committed to ensuring that prescriptions are dispensed safely and accurately to our patients.

Sources: KMSP, Mad World News / Photo credit: KMSP, WikiCommons