A pharmacist’s hard lesson: ‘Don’t be another Eric Cropp’

Eric Cropp

Eric Cropp is a 42-year-old convicted felon living in suburban Cleveland who may have a tough time finding a job in the future.

But the ex-pharmacist whose case led to “Emily’s Law” isn’t hiding from any of that, and he’s admirably candid about the events surrounding the Emily Jerry case.

Nearly a year off house arrest, Cropp’s new mission is to deliver a simple message to pharmacists, students and other healthcare workers involved in patient care: Don’t be another Eric Cropp.

Cropp plead no contest in 2009 to charges of involuntary manslaughter for failing to properly supervise a technician whose error in mixing a compound led to the death of 2-year-old Emily Jerry three years earlier.

In addition to becoming a cautionary tale for healthcare workers, Cropp has become something of a poster boy for the criminalization of nonmalicious medical errors. Most industry groups believe that seeking criminal charges against healthcare workers for honest mistakes only makes workers less likely to report those errors, which in turn prevents research that could help bring about change that could go toward solving the problem.

Cropp has recently begun to book speaking engagements and webinars with Chris Jerry, Emily’s father, to help educate health professionals and students about the danger seemingly small, careless medication errors can pose to patients. Jerry’s ex-wife, Kelly, has been less forgiving of Cropp.

“Eric Cropp’s incompetence goes far beyond conducting one reckless act,” Kelly Jerry testified to the Ohio Pharmacy Board several years ago. “Eric Cropp consciously disregarded any and every set standard of protocol regarding patient safety.”

Cropp recently spoke with MedCity News about why he believes medication errors shouldn’t be criminalized, how he’s tried to pick up the pieces of his life in the wake of the Emily Jerry tragedy and why he believes the pharmacist profession is being “cheapened.”

Q: What’s the key message you want to get across to other pharmacists?
A: I want everyone to think of who they’re taking care of and look at every patient or customer as a family member. Slow down and don’t feel you have to rush through each situation. Read through everything and go back and do it a second time to make sure you’ve done all the proper checks. Don’t feel pressure from whatever company you work for whether it’s a hospital or retail chain. Use my name when you’re presenting your case to your supervisor that you don’t want to be another Eric Cropp where you rush through a situation and make a mistake that might harm somebody.

What I’m seeing in talking to the retail side, with those promotions of “Get your prescription in 15 minutes,” it’s becoming like an assembly line where the patient is becoming a product and not a human being. It’s cheapening the pharmacist profession and making it more difficult for us to treat each patient as an individual.

Q: Talk about what it was like, as someone who’d been a white-collar worker all his life, to serve time in jail. What was the strangest part of the experience?
A: When I was in jail, I was thrown in with the general population. I was with everything from murderers, thieves and rapists to deadbeat dads who didn’t pay their child support to DUI offenders. I lost all my freedoms that I was used to, being told when to go to bed, eat, shower and when to do anything. I was treated like I had no worth.

I was put in the hole a couple times for minor incidents like not tucking my shirt in and not getting out of bed fast enough when I was sick. The hole is pretty defeating because they take everything away that stimulates you — no books, no pen and paper to write. You just sit there and you think. I broke up a couple fights and got hit myself once and I have a chipped tooth to prove it. But for such a horrible situation, I did find comfort in religion and was able to read through the Bible and talk through some of the passages with the other inmates.

Q: What was your immediate reaction when you learned Emily had died?
A: Upon hearing it, I broke down. I was almost hysterical. My two roommates came down to my room and were trying to calm me down. I kind of just shut down for that for the rest of the week. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I was just in a state of shock. I was just wishing it was me and not her.

Q: Why do you believe it’s counterproductive to prosecute pharmacists for honestly made medication errors?
A: Too many times we have a near miss and don’t share the information, and these type of incidents keep occurring. If we started punishing everyone for every little error, they’d be afraid to report errors because they’d feel they’d get in trouble. So, we wouldn’t have any examples to use to teach others. The hope is that reporting this stuff will make it less likely to happen in the future. Without any punishment, people will be more comfortable reporting errors and that’ll help make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again.

Q: You’ve been off house arrest for about a year. What have you been up to?
A: For my punishment, I was assigned 400 hours of community service, which required me to educate professionals on what happened to me. Because of that I was able to develop relationships with pharmacy organizations, continuing education programs and other medical organizations that sought out my story. With PharmCon, a continuing education company for pharmacists, I’ve been conducting webinars and done a couple live presentations.

Another thing I’m trying to do is become an advocate for other pharmacists, stressing the importance of safe working conditions, shorter working hours, adequate staffing and updated equipment. I have nothing to lose, so I can fight for the pharmacists and pharmacy techs who won’t speak out because they’re afraid they’ll lose their job or their license.

Q:Were you surprised when Chris Jerry reached out to you and suggested working together?
A: I was very, very surprised. For him to reach out, it almost immediately started a healing process that hadn’t yet happened for me or him. We were able to share our experiences from that day because we’d never previously had contact with each other. From that I felt like I found a purpose for why Emily had to die, so we could help others from going through what the Jerry family, as well as me, went through. During the trial, he felt that I came off as arrogant and uncaring, but I was told by my lawyers not to show any emotions. That ended up harming me and made me look bad because I couldn’t show how upset I was that Emily died. When we sat down to talk, he realized that what came across as me being uncaring was really just me being scared and nervous. It made me feel better to talk about how much it was eating me up inside and how hurt I was in trying to look strong and stoic.

I think what upset Kelly Jerry so much was she felt that I didn’t care. She felt I went in that day and did my job recklessly, but I was working in a stressful situation with a short staff. If we could’ve met right after Emily died, a lot of this may not have happened because they would’ve seen how sorry I was and we could’ve been supportive of each other.

Brandon Glenn MedCity News

Brandon Glenn is the Ohio bureau chief for MedCity News.

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Tags: Emily Jerry, Eric Cropp, hospitals, Northeast Ohio, Ohio, Politics

Comments Post a comment

Dear Eric,
being a Pharmacist my self I appreciate the fact that you have turned this sad sad story into a mission to highlight the problems that Pharmacists go through in the course of performing their duties. Profit has overtaken patient safety and it is all about numbers. Short staffing ,long hours without breaks and ill trained manpower is the norm now.

Comment by John .S — June 21, 2011 @ 1:00 pm

To Mr. Cropp and other pharmacists, what can we as consumers do to help make sure that drugs being dispensed to us and our families are correct? Is there any basic check that I as a lay consumer can do?

Comment by S — June 21, 2011 @ 2:36 pm

For S…when the pharmacy staff offers to counsel you on your prescriptions, accept the offer. That is the opportunity for you to discuss the medication with the pharmacist. If something doesn’t sound right, you can address it right then. If your pharmacy doesn’t offer to counsel you or acts like counseling you is a burden, then you should consider using another pharmacy.

Comment by Eric Durbin, RPh — June 21, 2011 @ 11:18 pm

S: I am a pharmacist- an easy resource is to use an online pill identification guide (do a Google search for “drug id” for several). You type in the color/shape and imprint on the medication and it tells you what it is. Each tablet/capsule is unique. Most prescription labels also contain a description of what the medication being dispensed should look like. You could make a phone call to your pharmacy to check as well. In the hospital, you could ask the nurse administering the medication to make sure what’s being given matches what was ordered. Hope this helps!

Comment by David — June 21, 2011 @ 11:51 pm

S: Please don’t rush the pharmacist filling your prescription, as there are many things to consider while filling the prescription. And when in the hospital don’t put pressure on nursing to rush the medications from pharmacy.

Comment by I — June 24, 2011 @ 1:47 am

Eric, I am a pharmacist too and where I work they cut hours and make us do more with less to jack up the stock price. It is criminal and it is industry wide. You got a raw deal. It is the people who control staffing that allow things like this to happen and they should be held accountable for their actions.

Comment by Ben — June 25, 2011 @ 12:17 am

Thank you Eric for bringing awareness for patient safety back. I work in a hospital and your license is at the mercy of technicians. A lot of times they come out of high school take a few months training and start working with dangerous drugs. A lot are unqualified to do so but it is cheaper to hire techs than pharmacists. A lot of these directors and managers can care less about patient safety just the least expensive way to get by. The blame always goes totally on the pharmacist, Techs get by with murder, literally in this case. I wouldn’t be surprised if that tech is still working. Pharmacists have to wake up and demand better training for technicians. All pharmacy tech positions should require BS degrees, no less. God Bless and good luck to you.

Comment by Joseph — June 25, 2011 @ 9:21 pm

Eric, I am a pharmacists as well. I think this situation is horrible and could have happened to any one of us. These mistakes happen because of the system not the pharmacist. As long as people are in charge of the dispensing process these dispensing errors will continue If people are afraid to report them the system will never improve. I think it is great that you are making pharmacists and the community aware of what is going on. I think however it is also our role as pharmacists to be our own advocates to fight for payment for our clinical services. Chains are making pharmacists work long hours, without proper staffing because insurance companies and PBM’s have drained every last dime of profit out of the dispensing process. Pharmacists unlike most other professions have tied all of the profits to the product and none of them to clinical services we provide. I blame pharmacists for that. We allowed it as a profession and now we are fighting back to show we have value. It is essential we move the profession in this direction. Until other sources of revenue are available chains will continue to look for ways to reduce costs. The only way to improve medication errors is to report errors appropriately to allow for system improvement, allow technology to do its work, adequate train technicians nationwide, and reimbursement for the professional clinical services that pharmacists perform. We need to go about this in a positive way, not by complaining that pharmacists are not valued or blaming mail order pharmacies, we need to shine with our positive attitude and show how much we want to help our patients! that is why we became pharmacists! It is so sad that this started with such a tragedy, but with the combined effort of you and Mr. Jerry, this may have already saved lives!

Comment by Phil — June 27, 2011 @ 5:00 pm

Eric, I am also a pharmacist. The cutting of staffing and more workload at my workplace creates a huge stress among the pharmacy staff. I agree with Phil that the system is a huge part of the problem. Safety issues don’t get addressed until something horrible happens because it takes too much time, effort, and money to proactively create an environment that would reduce errors. It has flowed to hospitals where reimbursement has decreased so cuts are made by upper management to areas that they think are not visibly apparent to patients, the pharmacy. I commend you for your attitude and your efforts to address this issue.

Comment by L — June 28, 2011 @ 4:47 pm

Eric, I am a pharmacist that has caught 20,000 would-be mistakes of mine at the last possible minute over my career. Only one has come before us who never made a mistake. What ever punishment you serve- I serve with you. At the end of time whatever glory I receive-you will receive with me.

Comment by Ron Power — July 3, 2011 @ 9:04 am

Eric, I am very proud of you. I am a pharmacist and I know how hard is to work short staff, long hours and with inexperienced technicians. Sometimes, we lose perspective and try to move faster to keep up with the flow and forget we are dealing with human lives. I work as a manager in a hospital and I do my best to train new pharmacists and provide everyone with tools to ease our job. Is not always easy, I want to share your story with my team as a reminder of our labor an example of courage. Thank you for helping make our profession honorable and respected. Fast is not always better.

Comment by Liliana Estrada — July 18, 2011 @ 2:51 pm

To Joseph, who said all pharm techs should have BS degrees…that would be great as long as hospitals are willing to pay for that degree…but no one is going to work for a college degree only to make $15/hr.

Comment by Michelle — July 24, 2011 @ 6:32 pm

I believe that all techs will be required to have at least an Associates degree + tech certification + be registered with state BOP. Standard’s must come from state boards of pharmacy.

Comment by George Kreytak — January 4, 2012 @ 11:42 am