Sunday 16 June 2013

Pharmacy Audits - teaching you how to hold a spatula



Every community pharmacy in New Zealand gets routinely audited every 4-5 years. I totally understand the need for quality control in community pharmacies. We deal with many drugs that could potentially kill people if given wrongly.

That being said, this current audit which I participated in recently shows that common sense and pharmacy audits are often mutually exclusive. Below are some of the things that came up:

(1) The hand washing basin in the dispensary is too far from the paper towel dispenser. It is three foot steps away.

(2) The dispensary Ibuprofen 200mg tablets (Nurofen, Advil etc.) cannot be repackaged down for personal use or to sell. This is despite the fact that it is the same strength of tablet as the ones you get from supermarket. Why? Because some bureaucrat at Medsafe decided to classify this particular packaging as "prescription only medicine"

(3) The wooden handle on the spatulas (that we use to make individualised dermatological creams) has tiny cracks on it.

Ahhhh bureaucracy at its best.