Consumer safety is crucially important within the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, due to the entrance of counterfeit drugs into the supply chain. Counterfeit prescription drugs
are a worldwide problem, which reach to as high as 30 percent of the supply in some countries. These counterfeit medicines are currently estimated to make up between 6% - 10% of the
worldwide market in medicines with annual sales in the region of $35 billion.
Studies reported that approximately half of patients could not correctly report how and when to take their medication 10 to 80 minutes after they were provided with the information. Yet another report stated that over 60% of the patients interviewed immediately after the visit with their medical practitioners, had misunderstood the directions regarding the prescribed
medication.
A unique study into prescribing errors by GP’s found mistakes such as wrong dosages, lack of instructions and insufficient monitoring of patients on dangerous drugs were ‘common’ with
a mean error rate of 8.9 errors per 100 administration of prescriptions.