pharmacy hours

Nurses Safety

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In the latest cost-cutting move, our hospital has now closed the pharmacy from 2100-0600. What they are doing is having the night nursing supervisor go into the pharmacy and pick up any new/emergent meds that are needed, and taking them to the floors. (The ER had to wait over 2 hrs on friday for diprivan for a hip reduction...)

question is: How do other hospitals work this? Are most open 24 hours (like we used to be)? I am also wondering if having the nursing supervisor get meds from pharmacy constitutes "dispensing meds" which would probably be out of the realm of her scope of nursing practice.... We are not a little podunk hospital...We have approx. 400 beds. Psych, chem dependancy, ortho, med-surg, telemetry, ER.

Any thoughts? (other than letting all management people go):p

Specializes in Med-Surg Nursing.

At my 226 bed hospital, our pharmacy is open from 7am to 10 pm M-F, and 8am to 5pm weekends and holidays.

So, if I need a med during off hours then the Nursing Supervisor has to go into the Documed room and get the meds for us.

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Specializes in Emergency Room.

I think one of the best suggestions is to utilize the pharmacist on call to the utmost....maybe if he/she is getting numerous calls during the night, we can get the pharmacist reinstated. I will also check with the state board of nursing. Two nights ago, the nursing supervisor called in sick. One of our ER nurses was told (when she walked in the door), that she would have to have pharmacy keys,and was given a 30 minute "orientation" to the pharmacy. What a situation just begging for a mistake! The ER was also packed to the gills the whole night with 2 rns for 10 beds.:eek:

She should have refused to do that....

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Wow, I didn't realize so many hospitals were doing this!

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Specializes in Emergency Room.

Holy cow,,,,I thought most "large" hospitals would have 24/7 pharmacy hours....especially with acute patients/er admits with new/changing med needs. I still think the individual state BON's would be more than interested that nurses are dispensing meds in the twilight hours!

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Well tonight at work I am going to kick myself when I start to b*t*h about the pharmacy taking so long send up my meds!

We have a 24/7 pharmacy at our ~600 bed hospital.

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I work for an 80 bed hospital and our pharmacy is open 0700-1900 on the weekdays and 0700-1400 on the weekend. Our pharmacy is terribly understaffed, so our meds are always late. JCAHO has changed the way we obtain meds after hours. We basically cannot go into the pharmacy except for life and death emergencies. We have tried to convince administration that the pharmacy needs to be open longer and have more staff but our pleas have fallen on deaf ears. We have a Documed, and according to our assistant executive director, the Documed is always stocked. LOL!! I work the day shift. I have had patients admitted at 0300 and still not have their 0800 meds by 1400!! I finally got tired of calling the pharmacy begging for meds. So, if the Documed is empty and the pharmacy has been open for more than two hours and I am missing meds, I make out an incident report. The other nurses are doing the same and we are getting noticed. The head pharmacist made a comment to our manager the other day about all the incident reports made out concerning the pharmacy. I just don't get worked up about anymore. I document that the med was unavailable at the scheduled time. My boss always knows when I have worked a weekend because her desk is covered in incident reports. Hopefully administration will take notice and do something. I can always dream. :) :)

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