| · Retention fee
· Personal control
· Shipman inquiry
· BNF-C
· TCM
· Counselling
· Publishing board
· Overseas membership
· Brewers' yeast
· Bullying
Letters to the Editor
|
Counselling
Mechanism for monitoring adequacy of counselling required
From Mr D. C. Smith, MRPharmS
I agree with T. U.
Qazi (PJ, 14 August, p220) that counselling helps
to reduce errors but my experience as a customer is that counselling
is rarely carried
out.
When collecting prescriptions over many years for myself or for my children,
all for one-off items, I can only remember being counselled once. Most
recently I was visiting my 84-year-old father who had been prescribed
a new drug. The regular pharmacist had been unable to supply it because
the prescription was unsigned and the drug was obviously not in my father’s
record.
I went to the surgery for a signature and then on to the pharmacy, where
there was one other customer being served by the assistant. The new drug
was dispensed and handed to me in a sealed bag with just a cursory check
of my father’s name and no counselling at all.
I think this is a disservice to patients and reflects poorly on pharmacy.
There should be some mechanism for monitoring the adequacy of counselling
since one of the requirements under the Code of Ethics and Standards
is that: “Pharmacists must ensure that the patient receives sufficient
information and advice to enable the safe and effective use of the medicine.”
Or maybe I will contact Which? ...
David Smith
Sheffield
|
The
Pharmaceutical Journal