A Tayside nursery worker has received a four-figure payout from pharmacy giant Boots after being left in agony when she squirted ear drops in her eye following a prescription bungle.
Alana Diplexcito, 33, of Dundee said her left eye felt like it was “on fire” after she suffered a chemical burn from the fluid.
She had gone to the firm’s city centre branch to fill in a prescription from her GP for an eye infection in the May 2018 incident.
She said: “I handed over the prescription and didn’t think anything more about it. There were two separate signatures on it.
“As soon as I got home and put the drops in it was absolute agony. I couldn’t open my eye.
“I felt like I would be sick the pain was so bad. I was really scared. My eye was on fire,” added Alana.
“Because of the nozzle on the bottle it poured out more than you would get from eye drops.
“My friend looked at it and said: “That’s not eye drops, it’s ear drops”.
She said Boots apologised after she contacted them to ask for help the following day, and rang to check her recovery.
The incident left her eyeball badly scarred and Alana initially received a £400 compensation offer.
She was signed off for around two months and took the company to court.
Alana was given a £1,105 out of court settlement, with the amount of Universal Credit she received while off work being deducted from the total.
She added: “My eye is still sensitive and not as crisp as it was.
“Since then I’ve had quite a few infections.
“If it had been a child it might have cried anyway so you might have just carried on using it.”
A Boots spokeswoman said: “We would like to offer our sincere apologies to the patient.
“We carried out an immediate investigation, thoroughly reviewing the actions identified from the incident and working to ensure implementation within our pharmacies.”
