Happy new year!
Well here we are at the start of 2007, and as much as I love Xmas, it’s nice to get back to a normal working week and customers that aren’t panicking any more because we are closed more than usual. Had a couple of interesting encounters recently:
• With the family of a patient who had recently come out of hospital with quite a number of new medicines who were very confused about them all. One of the district nurses had originally rung us up to alert us of this and to ask if there was any way we could do a temporary dosette box.
We did agree but when the family brought in all the medicines a lot them were either CDs or prn medication which made a dosette box a waste of time (aren’t dosette boxes seen as the answer to everything!).
So we prepared a medicines reminder chart instead which described what each medicine was for and suggested timings of the prn medicines (since some labels just had ‘One when required’). The family were delighted.
• The daughter of a stroke patient who originally came in the query whether she could halve some of her mothers tablets since her mother was ‘having trouble swallowing them all’. On looking at her mother’s medication I could see that this wasn’t possible for the majority of them since they were controlled release preparations, and so I suggested altered timings for some of the medicines so that her mother didn’t have to take quite so many all at once.
However the key thing was to urge her to arrange a medicines review with the GP so that the GP could consider liquid preparations, etc. I explained that struggling to take a large number of medicines was a common problem in stroke patients and so she shouldn’t suffer in silence.
• With the family of a patient who had recently come out of hospital with quite a number of new medicines who were very confused about them all. One of the district nurses had originally rung us up to alert us of this and to ask if there was any way we could do a temporary dosette box.
We did agree but when the family brought in all the medicines a lot them were either CDs or prn medication which made a dosette box a waste of time (aren’t dosette boxes seen as the answer to everything!).
So we prepared a medicines reminder chart instead which described what each medicine was for and suggested timings of the prn medicines (since some labels just had ‘One when required’). The family were delighted.
• The daughter of a stroke patient who originally came in the query whether she could halve some of her mothers tablets since her mother was ‘having trouble swallowing them all’. On looking at her mother’s medication I could see that this wasn’t possible for the majority of them since they were controlled release preparations, and so I suggested altered timings for some of the medicines so that her mother didn’t have to take quite so many all at once.
However the key thing was to urge her to arrange a medicines review with the GP so that the GP could consider liquid preparations, etc. I explained that struggling to take a large number of medicines was a common problem in stroke patients and so she shouldn’t suffer in silence.
posted by Dee Spencer at 9:26 am
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