Missing drugs reports on the up

It’s a familiar scenario; at the start of every shift, you check your vehicle to make sure you have all the equipment, medicine and drugs you might need for the day ahead. But what if you find drugs missing, broken or unusable?

When you report a drug issue on Datix like it’s been lost or stolen, or accidently broken, it’s logged as a ‘controlled drug incident’.

Between 1^st April and 30^th June [‘from’ tends to signify a line in the sand, ‘between’ signifies two distinct dates], there were 42 of these incidents reported across the region – and the highest number related to lost co-codamol tablets, with 93 tablets going missing in three months. A number of diazemul injections have been reported as lost as well.

Director of Nursing and Clinical Quality Sandy Brown said: “It’s really important that we keep a track of our drugs as we don’t want them falling into the wrong hands, so please do be diligent and make sure any medicines are stored, checked and monitored as tightly as possible.”

“We appreciate that occasional losses are inevitable, and I’d like to thank all of you who have been reporting so diligently over the past few months. It’s only through this reporting that we can make improvements to the system.”

The medicines management team are putting some measures in place to help improve our current numbers and prevent drug losses moving forward, including:

• implementing one ‘make ready’ sealed drugs-bag system across the entire region
• introducing a drugs help-line from September, where you’ll be able to anonymously report any missing medicine or drugs concerns
• regular station and medicine inspections by the clinical quality team
• introducing an action plan in the area that the Datix has been reported, which will be led by the senior locality manager, to try and prevent the same issue happening again.

 

Published 20th August, 2015