Does this seem a bit too convenient to anyone else?

[AngelfireRN, MSN, RN, APRN]

Hi again. I want to run this situation by a few more level heads than mine and make certain that we're not just jumping to conclusions.

We are a general medicine/pain managament practice that routinely prescribes narcotic meds. We see 3-4 new patients a week. I've been the NP here for about 2 years, all told. Last week, we had an occurrence that none of us could remember ever happening before (and for my clinic, that's saying something).

A new patient had been seen the week prior to Christmas vacation, and when we arrived back to work after the New Year, we had messages from 2 different pharmacies, wanting to confirm call ins for this patient. Here's the hitch. Both call ins came during vacation, and the name given to the pharmacies was not the name of anyone that works at my clinic. Both call-ins were for narcotic meds.

We summarily cancelled the refills and dismissed the patient, as it seemed a bit too convenient that the first happenstance of this occurred so shortly after their inception into the clinic and was perpetrated in theirname. The patient in question has a nursing background.

SO, in a nutshell, the patient had their first visit, and within a week, narcotic medication call-ins were attempted to two pharmacies in the patient's name, by someone who claimed to be from our clinic. Just a little too pat for our taste.

Has anyone else dealt with this, and would you have done the same, given the circumstances? Thank you.

[CapeCodMermaid, RN]

Since when can you call in a narcotic prescription? All the pharmacies around here (Massachusetts) require a hard copy of the script. Seems rather fishy.

[nitasarn]

Sounds fishy for sure.And it seems like you guys did the right thing. The office that I did clinicals at had a big problem with drug seekers, and it seems that they were turning it around, yet there was one patient that had somehow got the dea number and was writing script for themselves across little know pharmacies. The problem is is that they cant do anything or arrest them until they are caught red handed with the drugs in hand and how often does that happen.

[AngelfireRN, MSN, RN, APRN]

Down here, we can call in scripts for them, as well as escribe. Schedule 2s have to have a hard copy script.