Counting ALL home meds on admission

[sistrmoon]

We have to count all home meds on admission with 2 nurses, label each bottle with name of med, count, date, time and initials and lock them in the cabinet. Fair enough, but it's not just narcs but every aspirin, vitamin etc. I think this is a huge waste of nursing time and effort but I guess some patient accused us of stealing his non narc meds. Any other floors doing this?

[elkpark]

When I worked as a staff nurse in psych for many years, we routinely counted all of an individual's home meds if they weren't going to be sent home with family. If the person didn't have any way to send them home, we counted everything, schedule or no, made a list and placed a copy on the chart (which served as a receipt for the meds secured in the safe, and a reminder to send them home with the person at discharge), and locked up the meds. The only difference was we didn't need to have a second nurse witness.

I now work in psych C&L in the general hospital setting, and am still shocked that "regular" hospitals (at least, the ones I'm working in) allow people to have large quantities of unknown home meds in their rooms with them, so they may be taking who-knows-what along with their rx'd meds in the hospital. The first time I was doing an eval and asked someone about their home meds, and the woman leaned over, reached into her purse next to her bed, pulled out a gigantic plastic bag with, like, 20 bottles of various pills, and handed it to me ("Here, you can see for yourself"), I nearly fell out of my chair! Who on earth thinks that is a good idea???