I am a new Nurse Practitioner working in an outpatient surgical department. This department has 3 well experienced surgeons, 1 chief PA and 2 Nurse Practitioners. This practice, the surgeons are old timers and having major challenges with online prescription as their Electronic Medical Record is a nightmare to navigate. All 3 surgeons still writing prescriptions routinely. On a daily basis, they will write controlled drug prescriptions to give to the patient and many times the patients request to send their medicine order to their pharmacy online so that that they can pick up the medicine on the way home. This falls on me. Other times patients will call the practice to request controlled drugs for pain management. At this time, the surgeons will write prescription and fax to the pharmacy which thy will reject the order.
This is a real dilemma for me as a new NP working in this practice, as I am forced to prescribe controlled drugs for the entire practice because no one else can order this online. I have never seen the patient and no where in the chart what pain medication the surgeon previously ordered. The surgeons will not write why the patient needed the controlled drug, what other options they have tried, how long are they planning to give etc. I am not talking about few weeks post operative pain control. Patients are taking it for years.
What should I do in this situation? Any suggestion??
