Taking the plunge

I recently described a bag of patient-returned medicines which also contained some knitting needles and tea bags. Well we can now better this after having another bag of medicines returned to us which also contained a toilet plunger!

We do explain to patients that we will open the bag and sort through the medicines that have been returned to us, but it doesn’t seem to stop some rather curious items appearing from time-to-time…

Here are some of the recent interventions I have made:

• Telling numerous patients prescribed a short course of erythromycin to stop taking their simvastatin whilst taking the antibiotic.

• Getting a short course of trimethoprim changed to an alternative for a patient also taking methotrexate.

• Getting an ACE inhibitor removed from a repeat prescription which also contained a newly prescribed angiotensin II inhibitor.