adverse reactions to medication handouts

My unit has found yet a new way to hinder nursing practice. It is procedure to give patients handouts when they receive new medications. Being med nurse, it is extremely important to me (and my job) that patients know what medications they are taking and why they are taking them. Out of everyone, I would say that I am the most prolific printer of med handouts. I do use judgment and will not initiate a handout to a very paranoid delusional patient (if the patient asks me, it is his right). On Sunday, I printed out a handout to a mostly Spanish- speaking woman in spanish. Apparently after I left, she read it over and panicked that the med was going to kill her and refused the med. This patient does not have any psychotic disorder, but is definitely one of those patients who always finds something to ruminate about. It makes me wonder whether it is the first spanish med handout she has ever received >_<. That would say horrible things about the system if that were true. (probably an irrelevant point, but perhaps the patient is right to worry about taking Thorazine for sleep).

So the wise minds of the unit decided that med handouts should be a doctor's order. what??! As much as I desire more MD-patient medication education, it seems like a waste of their time to write out every med sheet they want each patient to receive and endless irritation for nurses having to ask the docs. The night charge told me tonight that I will need to tell the patients to ask the docs for permission for the handouts. If I answer every question with 'ask the doctor', I am useless.

In my opinion, this is a huge undermining of my job as med nurse. There is no intervention that will benefit every patient. Perhaps, rather than banning her from handouts, this just means that she needs more education. What if she were just watching TV one day at a commercial of her med and stopped taking it because of the side effect warnings at the end of the ad. There is also a legal standpoint of the ethicality of giving a spanish-speaking patient a med when the language barrier makes the administering nurse unable to adequately describe the med verbally.

Is this truly as ridiculous as it appears to me? Am I over-reacting? I will need to drag myself to the next nursing "leadership" meeting to fight this one with the half an ounce of credibility I still have here. I think it would make more sense for the docs to tell us whom {not} to make handouts for and assume that we make handouts for everyone else for all new meds and any requested med information.

Thanks for listening to another of my job rants =).


*counting the days until my NP program begins*