An extra dosette of fun

We’ve had great fun and games with our dosette box service this week.

First of all, a nursing home insisted that we hadn’t supplied the extra prn medication with two of their resident’s dosette boxes.

We are always very careful to ensure that these ‘extras’ are secured to the boxes and so asked the home to have a good look round.

Thankfully they did ring us back to say that they had found the ‘extras’ tucked away in the respective residents’ rooms.

We also have a growing issue around a lack of communication and understanding of the dosette box service when patients are discharged from hospital.

The bottom line is that we can’t make any changes to the dosette box without instructions from the GP practice. However on two occasions this week we’ve had patients’ relatives come into the pharmacy to say that the hospital had stopped some of the drugs and so could we remove them from the dosette box?

This then involved us following up on the discharge medication sheet and then ringing the GP practice to get the go-ahead.

We have also had one occasion this week where the hospital has contacted us directly and asked for medication in the dosette box to be changed.

Again we explained that we are unable to do anything without the say-so of the GP practice (much to the surprise of the hospital!) and so asked the hospital to fax us the relevant discharge information so that we could then contact the GP practice and the patient to take this forward.

As we all know this type of service takes up a great deal of our time and we simply couldn’t do it without the ever-contentious issue of weekly scripts.