Missing item

We have had a week of lost script items. We hardly ever get patients ringing up to say that we haven’t given them everything that was on their scripts, but over the holiday period we’ve had four!

Like everyone else we always count the items into a bag and then seal it before handing it out. If a patient then rings in to say that an item isn’t in their bag we explain our procedure to them and ask them to bring the entire bag contents back to the pharmacy so that we can check it over again (our worry always being that if we have counted the items into a bag and a patient is missing something then they may have something else that they shouldn’t have).

This usually means that the patients then go away and have a good look round again before coming back to the pharmacy – and this worked in three out of the four telephone calls this week when patients then rang back to say they had found their ‘lost’ items.

But we just couldn’t get to the bottom of it with our fourth patient and so after exploring all avenues we finally re-dispensed the item to them (what else can you do without making a big song and dance out of it?) with an explanation that strictly speaking we should be reporting the loss of the item to the police, etc.

We have also made a note in this patient’s record that in future we will count the items into the bag in front of them.