[NFBOH-Cleveland] Prescription Information Accessibility Act

[Cheryl Fields]

 Prescription Information Accessibility Act
The Problem
Pharmacological advances in recent years have resulted in doctors’
prescribing more and more powerful medications for high blood
pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, COPD, heart abnormalities, and
above all pain management, to name a few. These medications have exact
and varied dosage instructions: once a week, after meals, six times a
day, etc. Moreover, the side-effect warnings are dire: bleeding,
thoughts of suicide, sleep-walking, nausea, and the like. The result
is that careful and responsible patients and their care-givers must
constantly consult the literature that comes with medications.
Considering these truths and the fact that 7,300,000 adult Americans
in 2015 identified themselves as having visual impairments, along with
the growing aging population, there is a significant percentage of
Americans that cannot independently identify their medications or read
the literature that comes with them.
The only reliable way of providing accessible paper information about
dosage and background information about medications to people with low
vision is for someone to put it  into large print or Braille. But many
visually impaired people cannot read print of any size or contrast,
and less than 10 percent of all blind adults read Braille.
For this reason, blind and visually impaired people have no choice but
to depend on memory: trying to recall what shape and size their pills
are, marking pill bottles with rubber bands and paperclips, and
placing medications in various locations. Then they have to try to
remember the dosage instructions and their personal systems for
telling medications apart. This is so clearly dangerous that many
people give up managing their medications or settle for the
possibility of making serious, even life-threatening errors. The
social cost of this situation is serious and growing. Some people have
no choice but to give up their independence for the supervision of
nursing homes. The cost of medication errors is incalculable.
In this post-Americans-with Disabilities-Act era of the established
right  of disabled people to equal access to information, blind people
should have the information about their medications that everyone else
takes for granted. The right to have full access to medical
information is one more manifestation of the right to independence
already granted in the Americans with Disabilities Act but not yet
available in the real world.
The Solution
Luckily technology advances today provide the needed solutions. The
Access Board has developed best practices for providing Braille, large
print, and audible prescription information. We believe that making
audible prescription information generally available is the best way
of solving the equal access problem. Every retail and mail-order
pharmacy in Ohio should notify each blind or visually impaired person
to whom a drug is dispensed that a prescription reader is available to
the person and should provide on request such a label attached to the
container that the recipient can read with a device provided by the
pharmacy. This device will convey audibly all the information
contained on the label.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
If you can help us develop this legislation or are interested in
sponsoring the bill when it is introduced, contact Sheri Albers,
National Federation of the Blind of Ohio Legislative Committee Chair:
sheri.albers87 at gmail.com or (513) 886-8697.

--