I'm in my last semester of nursing school and I'm also staying with my grandfather because he had an MI last January and was in ARF, then followed on an intermediate care unit and D/C'ed with cardiac rehab. Now he also has bladder cancer, so he does need someone here with him. He takes all kinds of meds. One in particular, is darvocet, in which he takes it regularly for shoulder pain.
I ordered two meds for him on Monday the 19th. I didn't realize that the scripts were over with on these meds, so I requested that the pharmacy call his primary care physician for an authorization that would hold him over until he's able to get in for an appointment (this is a chain pharmacy, I won't give names in case they're reading this).
So it was required that I give them at least 24 hours to call his doc. I gave them two. Grandpa picked up the meds on Wednesday. One was his usual blood pressure med that I ordered, and the other one I didn't recognize. I opened the bag, then I opened the pill bottle. I didn't recognize the pills. Then I looked at the label and realized that this med was meant for someone else, with a similar sounding name as my grandfathers. No biggie, I was a little concerned because my grandpas vision isn't all that great and if I wasn't living with him he would have never noticed. Another concern was that the wrong med he recieved was a narcotic. Oh boy who knows what would've happend if he was taking TWO narcs.
Anywho, I didn't make a fuss over it. I took the wrong meds right back to the pharmacy. I explained to the pharm tech what happend and that I just wanted to give them back and get the meds that should've been ordered.
The alarming part, was that he took the narcs from me, and put them right back into the customer pick-up bin, without checking to see if the bag had been opened, or even verifying that the narcs were there, and he didn't even count them.
If I wasn't an honest person, I could have really just thrown some tic-tacs in there and called it a day, but I'm not like that.
I wrote a formal e-mail complaint to this pharmacy, and have yet to hear back. I remember the name from the medication bag, and went to whitepages.com and found his phone number. Should I seriously call this guy and tell him to file a complaint with the pharmacy, re: HIPAA violation & potential med tampering? I think he really has a right to know what COULD have happend.
Are there protocols in place for pharmacies for these situations that arise? I would have imagined that they should have taken the narcs back, wrote up some kind of report, threw the meds in the trash (or kept somewhere for investigation) and just re-do the other guys whole prescription?
