Mr Angry

Had a difficult consultation with a gentleman today who was travelling abroad and needed malaria prophylaxis. On consulting the NPA charts it was clear that he needed one of the POM malaria regimes.

However, he was insistent that for various reasons he couldn’t take any of these and ‘just wanted to buy’ some chloroquine and paludrine.

So, rather than refuse him the sale outright, I took his telephone number and said I would look into it further.

I rang one of the national help lines to enquire about the efficacy of chloroquine and paludrine and was told they were a complete waste of time.

I then rang the travel nurse at the patient’s practice and she informed me that she had also been trying to persuade him to take one of the POM regimes and that he was coming back to see her to get his jabs.

I rang the gentleman back and told him my reasons for refusing the sale (i.e. that it wouldn’t be in his best interests if I did, and that I wasn’t willing to take the clinical responsibility for selling him something that wouldn’t work).

He was furious and didn’t see why I just couldn’t ‘sell him the tablets and be done with it’. I haven’t heard anything since but I really hope that the travel nurse could finally make him see sense.