Ok so today is my day off, and I wake up bright and early to a phone call from my job. I didn't answer it but checked the machine and it was the dayshift RN supervisor telling me she has to ask me some questions for me to please call her back. I called her back and she is telling me that on Monday of this week pharmacy came to bring meds, I signed for them and apparently they brought a patients vicodin, and those are now missing???
So I am like ok, first of all I am trying to wrap my head around this at the crack of dawn and get my thoughts together. She asked me if I remember receiving the narcs, and I told her no. You have to understand that pharmacy comes at least 3 times on my shift, so no I don't remember specifically receiving that residents narcs. I did explain to her that if the narcs were received I had one med cart for one particular hall which does not have the narcs in it. The other nurse I worked with that night had the other med cart which had the locked box for narcs. If the med was received I would have had to add however many the pharmacy sent to the pt's current count, and I would have had to give the narcs to the other nurse to put in the locked box because she had that med cart I did not.
So she told me she was going to call me back she was going to call the other nurse. I waited about an hour then called her back. I was not worried at all because I know I did nothing wrong, if I received the narcs I would have put them where they belong, I have no reason to steal anything never would! So I call her and she says oh that nurse doesn't remember getting anything either that night the problem is that you signed for it, and you may be losing your job over this because it's a narcotic. So I called the DON no answer, call the ADON which is very very nice, she proceeds to tell me that she knows I would never take anything but that this is a huge problem and that the police have to get involved, it's probably going to involve a lawsuit, and I could possibly lose my license.
She asked me to come in and write a statement, this is when I started to get worried. All I have wanted to do all ever since I was little was to become a nurse, and now that I am a nurse this cannot be happening. I worked so hard to get where I am today. So I write my statement basically saying that yes I may have signed for meds that day but I do not remember receiving narcs for that resident. One thing you have to understand is that when pharmacy comes they have a clipboard and they hand you say 2 bags then on the clipboard it will say 2 bags 2nd floor they say sign here then they leave. You do not know you are getting a narcotic unless you open the bag. Inside the bags are invoices with the residents names & presciption # of all the meds that they sent us in the bag. Those invoices we keep and send down to the offices. So my other suggestion was to look for the invoices if we have one with that residents name & pres # then I have a problem! If not it was never received. So the ADON pulls out the invoices for that day....guess what it's not on there whew! Then she calls pharmacy and asks about that prescription and the pharmacist says we are filling it now, and she says but is it just being filled for the first time or was this filled & sent on Monday like we were told earlier? She asked him like 5 times and he repeatedly told her that it was RE-ORDERED on monday but just being filled today!!! So she just told me well just take it as a lesson, you are fine.
My question is this has me thinking do I need to get Liability Insurance to cover myself just in case. Because thinking about this situation and the fact that I could have ended up losing my license is really scarry. Does any LPN's out there have this insurance. Please tell me your thoughts on this. I am going to enjoy my day off today despite what happened earlier but I want to do things differently from now on. Also, what are your takes on the way my facility handles receiving meds from pharmacy? Why do we have to have 2 nurses count narcs before& at change of shift but just 1 nurse can sign for narcs and not double check before pharmacy leaves to make sure we have what they claim to be giving us???
