Calling In Scripts

My hospital has been trying to nudge the physicians into writing more prescriptions for patients to take to their pharmacies to get filled instead of calling them in.

In the past, the dr's just wrote out discharge meds and left it up to nursing to decide what is an old med and what is new and needs to be called in. There were rarely instructions for # and refill, it was just left up to nursing to figure it out.

This still largely occurs, but dr's ARE writing more scripts, which I think the gold standard is for the patient to present it personally to the pharmacy so they have it right in front of them when filling. Second best is faxing it. But then you have a variety of things that people do with the originals, everything from handing them back to the patients (amazingly, this happens frequently on my unit!) to writing "faxed" on it and placing it on the cahrt, to destroying the original.

My problem is with patients who won't take the paper prescription and insist it be called in. There are a few pharmacies around here that either don't have faxes or have been known to "lose" the fax and the patients end up with NO meds (of coorifice it is the nurses's fault).

I always insist if the dr writes a paper script that the patient take it, even if they give me a hard time (and mostly, they do).

I explain that it is a safety initiative, that by physically taking the script to the pharmacy they are significantly reducing the chance of a med error, and point out how med errors have been cited in the news as so dangerous.

Does anyone see this reluctance to take their own scripts to the pharmacy or is this a regional thing? Our patients ARE pretty used to being spoiled by the hospitals areound here and pretty much getting anything they want. (I don't feel like going home yet. Maybe tomorrow. The food is so good!)