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