Our job as pharmacists is to dispense the right medication to the right patient and make sure it is correct and appropriate. It's also our job to protect the patient, sometimes from the prescriber or doctor who wrote the prescription.
Above is an example. A careless pharmacist would just type this up as:
Dissolve one and one-half tablet under tongue twice daily as needed for pain.
But a good pharmacist would see the conflicting notes and if he or she didn't know the patient and history, he or she would call the doctor. This careless doctor actually wants the patient to take one tablet in the morning and one-half tablet in the pm.
What would happen if this patient was given incorrect instructions? Probably not much. But with a different drug this could be catastrophic.
Think about that the next time you're pressuring your pharmacist to hurry with your prescription.
4 comments:
Most commonly seen on electronically prescribed prescriptions. I suppose that the most common directions are auto-populated on Size 12 font and doctors just add a note in Size 6 font at the very bottom with the correct directions.
That is why I stick with one pharmacy even though competitors might be cheaper on some things. They know me and my family. All of my meds are in their system. Recently a mistake on dosage was caught by my pharmacist. I trust him more than the doctors that prescribed it.
Is it weird that I've never asked a pharmacist to hurry? I just do the refill through my phone and pick it up when it's ready. Do people really call and harass you?
I wish you were my pharmacist. Mine is incompetent (but it's where my insurance will pay, so hi-ho). A doctor prescribed Adderall for my son and I picked it up from the pharmacy. He spent the night hysterical and hallucinating. Turns out, they went ahead and filled the dose for a 200lb adult man for a 9 year old kid... wouldn't a decent pharmacist have questioned that? They also have not filled prescriptions for my 5 year old because "he didn't have a phone number listed and we couldn't confirm when he wanted to pick it up." He's 5, you use his MOTHER's phone number as listed in his information, genius. The most recent issue (this week) was when I called to ask a question about a prescription I had dropped off 3 days prior and he said, "Oh, we will have to special order that." "So do you want us to fill it?" Yes. Yes I do. Note: it was a 10mg pill of a very common med instead of the 5mg and it turns out that they had the 10mg in stock anyway. Still had to wait until the end of the day to pick it up. I call another pharmacy if I have any real questions or concerns. I don't trust them to keep me and my family safe at all.
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