Worth shouting about

Here are some of the more interesting interventions that I have made lately (I realise that this has become a fairly regular slot in my blog but I’m passionate about shouting about all the really valuable clinical work that community pharmacists do every day):

• The lady given an acute prescription for a short course of itraconazole capsules who was adamant that she was going to insert them because the ‘doctor said that she was going to get something that she could insert’. I gently persuaded her otherwise.

• The wife administering her husband with Oxynorm Concentrate with the directions of ‘2mls to given when required for breakthrough pain’. She had misread the label and had been administering two full 5ml syringes each time.

• The patient newly prescribed a Symbicort inhaler who was going to stop using the blue reliever inhaler and carry on using the current preventer brown inhaler together with Symicort.