No 24 Hr Pharmacy

[MDRRAJ]

Our hospital doesn't have a 24 hr Pharmacy yet. Apparently it is difficult to recruit hospital pharmacists when working outside of a hospital is more lucurative. My questions are: Who dispenses the medications and Do you have to profile these meds before dispensing? What about potassium and k-phos?

[TrudyRN]

We also use the night/weekend locker system. It's stocked fairly well, actually. Also, the floors keep some stock.

We can call a pharmacist to come in if all else fails but we try to keep this to a minimum.

Some Nursing homes I've worked had no on-site pharmacy provisions and had to either rummage through meds of present or even discharged clients whose meds had not yet been returned to the pharmacy we contracted with. Or we had to get orders to hold a med if we couldn't get it in a reasonable time frame or use a home med if it was urgent for the patient to get it. It was rather a pain in the tush. The rummaging was probably not legal but Admin and DON knew about it, encouraged it even.

[rnin02]

We used to not have pharmacy at night, the nursing supervisor would get any meds we needed that we couldn't get from the pyxis, we would just call her and tell her what we needed. Then for a while we had to fax our orders to a pharmacist, get their approval, and then the nursing supervisor would take our order, do something further in the pharmacy with it and then finally we would get our meds. It took forever, the pharmacist we had to fax was some company we contracted with, half the time we couldn't get thru, it was so slow...but i guess safer in the long run. now we have a pharmacist 24/7, so much better!

[Bluehair]

I work at a smallish rural hospital. Our pharmacy hours are 7-3:30 or so. At night the supervisor can get some meds if they are not in the accudose (sometimes that just means getting from a different accudose than ours in ICU). No access to narcotics, tho. Pharmacist will come in if it is a med the super has no access to and if it can not wait. We mix our own drips for the most part (such as pressors, etc.). We do not keep any concentrated electrolytes anywhere in the hospital. If there is an order for K+, etc. it comes pre-mixed in a 50 - 100 cc bag in the accudose.