perscription pads

[hunter-belle]

Our hospital just eliminated the "nursing station" in favor of individual "alcoves" for nurses to store the patient chart, meds, supplies as well as computer terminals for data entry. Doctors want perscription pads available at all times and are frustrated that we keep them in our pyxis. Instead they want them kept in the med drawers in the alcoves. According to our pharmacy, this is a dangerous practice since it will be difficult to keep track of the number of percriptions given out-a sure temptation for someone if we're not on top of this.

I'm not in favor of individual logs since that will be a nightmare to monitor. What is the practice in your hospital?

[grandee3]

Sometimes they are laying all over on the desk. Not good, but I don't know of any problems. Every place else I have worked, the pads were in the locked Narc cabinet or Pyxis or Omnicell.

[lpnstudentin2010, LPN]

at my hospital they are either paper rx pads that are laying around, but they NEED to put a sticker with the patients name and info on it and most of the pharms in the general area know as such,

and then I am not sure if this is just in some departments or all now but the GI department at least has a comp program where they type in what they want and it prints it, and doc signs it.

[abundantjoy07, RN]

Actually ours are lying around the nurses station in drawers. They are easy to find and get a hold of which makes me wish we were kept more accountable of them.`

[imanedrn]

Update: The day after posting that we do NOT keep ours locked up... we were told to start keeping them locked in our med carts. It's funny what they do when JCAHO's around the corner...

:lol_hitti