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An Audit: Compliance of Controlled Drug Prescriptions With Legal Requirements and Approved Home Office Wording
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2024
Abstract
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Aims
The completion of methadone and buprenorphine prescriptions, together: opioid substitution therapy (OST), must conform to legal requirements for the prescription of controlled drugs (CDs) as well as Home Office approved wording when writing instalment prescriptions.
Our service uses a part automated printing system for individual prescriptions and uses a manual record to track prescriptions issued for individual clients over time, a “script record”.
We aimed to audit the terms used on the internal script record as well to audit compliance of OST prescriptions with the legal requirements for CD prescriptions and Home Office Approved wording for instalments.
Methods
All prescriptions for methadone or buprenorphine over the course of a week that were prepared for signing were audited.
The prescriptions were audited against the legal requirements for writing CD prescriptions and against Home Office approved wording for instalment prescriptions.
The script record was audited against internal standards for variation of terms used to describe frequency of collection of instalments.
Results
A total of 64 prescriptions were audited.
100% of prescriptions complied with the legal requirements for the prescription of CDs.
7 prescriptions (11%) omitted Home Office approved wording to instruct what should be done on days when the dispensing pharmacist was closed, i.e. that instalments should be dispensed on the prior open day.
46 prescriptions (72%) had additional Home Office approved wording that was not applicable to the script. For example additional wording to allow for pickup of part of an instalment following a missed day, when the prescription was only for daily supervised consumption to begin with.
Audit of the internal script record found a total of 13 different terms used to describe frequency of collection of instalments; there are 6 standardised terms used within the internal script record. On 2 occasions the frequency of collection of instalments was left blank.
Conclusion
It is essential that prescriptions for controlled drugs follow the legal requirements laid out for them; within the scope of our audit these were entirely adhered to.
There was however more variability in the use of the Home Office approved wording for instalments of OST. Scripts here tended to error for including additional wording not relevant to the specific script. Additionally, the service's own internal script record showed variability in the terms used to describe frequency of collection.
It is evidently important that the wording on prescriptions is clear and concise and the terms used internally are standardised.
- Type
- 5 Audit
- Information
- BJPsych Open , Volume 10 , Supplement S1: Abstracts from the RCPsych International Congress 2024, 17–20 June , June 2024 , pp. S259
- Creative Commons
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Royal College of Psychiatrists
Footnotes
Abstracts were reviewed by the RCPsych Academic Faculty rather than by the standard BJPsych Open peer review process and should not be quoted as peer-reviewed by BJPsych Open in any subsequent publication.
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