Keep an eye on those Rx pads!

Nurses Safety

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My husband is currently investigating a case where a patient stole a Rx pad from her MD clinic and got her narc filled at a local pharmacy.

I've heard of this happening in dentists offices quite often, (one of my nieces worked in a large dentist group)but never in a docs office.

Anyone else?.

Specializes in OB, M/S, HH, Medical Imaging RN.

In the OIC we keep them locked up.

We've been getting CT & MRI orders on RX blanks from a pain specialist. They are tamper-proof x 3 which is all very interesting but doesn't work if someone steals the blanks. The tamper-proof features keep the person from changing the actual script.

The tamper-resistant pads contain a chemical that reveals when efforts have been made to alter the paper. For example, the heat from a copier may cause the word void to appear. The pads contain serial numbers that are entered into a computer by the pharmacist so that they can be matched against a doctor's order.

I forget what the third feature is.

I have a question along the line of prescriptions.

I'm sure you all are familiar with discharges that go on in hospital settings. Having recently moved to dayshift where there are LOTS more discharges than there were on NOC shift, I am doing more and more discharges. As RNs, we are responsible for going over all the usual discharge sheets, instructions, whatif/worstcase phone #'s, all that. Beyond that, we also hand the patient the prescriptions that the docs have written for them to be filled at their pharmacy (or ours).

My question is, how come the nurses who taught me the procedure for doing these discharges say it's a nono to make copies of the prescriptions? Lots of the scripts are for narcs, but when I made a copy of one of them during my first discharge before I knew we weren't supposed to, the photo copy came out with VOID written several times on it.

When I asked why we weren't keeping copies of the scripts given to the patients, I was told that it was because of security issues. Like someone using a copy to fill a script. How could that be if it says VOID all over it? Weird!

I was (still am) of the opinion that making copies of all the scripts given to the patients and putting them in the chart (after all, it's going to be broken down and sent to MR soon enough) would be a good way for the hospital to have proof that the script was actually given to the client, or at least show that it was written. ??

I realize the discharge papers have all the scripts written on them, but that's really no guarantee that they HAVE been written. With the sheer volume of scripts some of these folks get, I could see how easily a doc could omit one of them from the list and never write it out.

Does this make sense?

That would be nice. Docs don't always put what they give you in the comp like they are supposed to. I had a script for either oxycodone, or oxycontin once my mom can't remember which (and I was too out of it) and I was allergic. We now are not certian which it was, cuz that doc didnt put it in.

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