Reply With QuoteI can't believe this; the patients need the meds, and there's a hang up. *Sigh* :blah:
I tell ya, they are making it so stinking ridiculous anymore! http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/he...y/07aging.html
The Drug Enforcement Administration has issued a new guideline intended to help ease the delay some nursing home residents face in receiving certain painkillers and anti-anxiety medications.
Physicians may now authorize nurses employed by long-term care facilities to phone in their oral prescriptions for these controlled substances to pharmacies, the agency said in a policy statement published on Wednesday in the Federal Register, the daily publication of changes to government rules.
It is already a common practice for nurses who work at hospitals or for doctors in private practice to transcribe and transmit such prescriptions. But only doctors and certain other medical professionals can prescribe medications.
The new guidelines should “expedite in many cases getting the prescription processed and dispensed by the pharmacist, delivering it to the ultimate user and decreasing the potential for a patient to be in pain or discomfort longer than necessary,” said Lynne Batshon, the director of policy and advocacy at the American Society of Consultant Pharmacists, a group of about 7,000 pharmacists who specialize in elder care.
The D.E.A. had not previously recognized nurses employed by nursing homes as the legal agents of doctors in conveying controlled substances prescriptions to pharmacists. The agency previously counseled pharmacists who dispensed such drugs to nursing home patients to do so only via direct oral or written communication with a doctor. The agency’s previous stance, critics said in an article last week in The New York Times, caused many nursing home residents to suffer in pain while they waited for their prescriptions.
The D.E.A. is currently investigating pharmacists in about five states for dispensing such drugs to nursing homes without direct written orders from a doctor.
According to the recent guidelines, doctors may authorize more than one nurse or other medical professionals at a time to communicate their oral prescriptions for certain controlled substances to pharmacies.
Senator Herb Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat who is the chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, called the new policy a step in the right direction. But he said the changes still did not give nurses the ability to transmit prescriptions for other important medications, including morphine.
“In certain situations, the doctors and nursing staff in long-term care facilities would still have to jump through hoops in order to get a patient the pain medication they desperately need,” Mr. Kohl said in an e-mail statement. “But obviously we’re pleased to see the D.E.A. making some progress.”
This is a related story: http://www.ultimatenurse.com/forum/f...95/#post132368
I can't believe this; the patients need the meds, and there's a hang up. *Sigh* :blah:
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