CDs are such fun

Thanks to that lovely Dr Shipman I now have to jump through so many hoops when dealing with controlled drugs (morphine, methylphenidate and so on) that I may have well trained as an acrobat rather than a pharmacist. One measure that has been introduced is running balances for our registers (though just good practice at present). Now this has caused some changes to be made. In the past there would be one register for all morphine preparations and one for all methylphenidate preparations. Now we have one register for each morphine preparation - so there is one for morphine 10mg modified release tabs and one for morphine 100mg modified tabs.

The pharmacy I have just started managing introduced running balances in July. Not much time for things to go wrong? If only. When reconcilling theroetical balances with actual stock there were about ten items that were wrong, and there were locums who did things like adding Durogesic 25mcg patches to Durogesic 12mcg patches. And lots of pharmacists can't add up: 134 - 30 = 104? not according to some.

So after lots of fun checking through invoices and looking through patient medication records I managed to sort most of the problems out. However there were some which I couldn't solve and have had to adjust the balances. In two cases we actually had more stock than we should have. I'm not too bothered about that. In two other cases I had less stock than I should have had. So I've sent letters to the superintendent and the owner outlining the situation and the stock levels I am prepared to be responsible for.

This mess probably took more than 15 hours to sort out, but hopefully it will all run smoothly from now. The RPSGB obviously live on a different planet as they recommend that stock is reconcilled with the running balance on a weekly basis. When am I ever going to have time to do that?

In other news, I had a meeting with the local GP surgery. They all seem very nice and were enthusiastic about MURs. They even offered to refer patients to me! They weren't to keen with me asking them to prescribe dressings and injections in complete packs - worried about their budget. In truth the impact on their budget will be minimal, especially given that I save them money by picking up people with silly prescriptions such as perindopril 2mg 2 tabs daily (for some reason the 2mg tabs are the same price as the 4mg tabs). I just hate having split packs of dressings on the shelf that are never going to be used again. Something to work on with the practice and district nurses I think.