A prescription issued by a doctor is like a check. It en titles you to receive drugs at a pharmacy and their reimbursement. Any error on it may, however, take away this right. Which mistakes can a pharmacist correct and which only a doctor? See what a correctly written recipe looks like.
In Polish legislation there is a regulation on medical prescriptions , which precisely specifies the rules for issuing and carrying them out. Each prescription is analyzed by a pharmacy employee in terms of both content and form. Then it goes to the archive, where it lies for 5 years. During this time, the National He alth Fund can control their correctness. If he detects an error, the pharmacist will have to pay back the reimbursement granted to the patient and additionally pay the pen alty specified in the agreement with the National He alth Fund. This is why pharmacists check each prescription so carefully before filling it. It turns out that mistakes on them happen very often. Fortunately, some of them can be corrected by a pharmacist. With others, unfortunately, the patient has to go back to the doctor.
Correctly written prescription: PESEL no error
Each prescription must contain the data of the person for whom the medication was prescribed (recipient) in the appropriate place. They include name, surname, address and PESEL number. For children under 18, their age should also be stated here. If medications are prescribed for a newborn who does not yet have a PESEL number, the doctor will include the mother's number.
This part of the prescription with the PESEL number is by far the most common problem faced by a pharmacist in a pharmacy. He checks it with a pharmacy computer program. If it is incorrect, filling of the prescription is blocked.
Most often it is a matter of rearranged or missing numbers. This type of error can be corrected by a pharmacist by asking the patient for any PESEL confirmation document. However, he cannot add it in full if the doctor has not done so. A prescription without a PESEL number cannot be refunded by the National He alth Fund, and the medication prescribed on it will be provided to the patient without discounts.
Correctly spelled out prescription: number of the NHF Branch
In the "Department of the National He alth Fund" box, the doctor must enter the number identifying the branch of the National He alth Fund which is responsible for reimbursement of drugs for a given patient. No number in thatplace means that the patient is uninsured and cannot receive discounted medication. Even if it is a doctor's mistake or oversight, the pharmacist has no authority to correct it.
The situation is different in the case of the "Additional permissions" window. In it, the doctor enters symbols that give the patient a greater than normal discount on drugs. Most often it concerns war invalids, repressed people or meritorious blood donors. If, in their case, the doctor forgets to enter the symbol of their additional authorization, the pharmacist has the option of supplementing it - on the basis of an appropriate document: ID card, booklet, certificate.
Correctly written prescription: maximum amount of the drug
A lot of errors relate to the way drugs are written to the patient. The recipe says that a prescription cannot contain more than 90 days of treatment. Each time the pharmacist calculates the time for which the drugs will suffice, based on the dosage, which the doctor should indicate on the prescription in such cases. If the calculations show that the drug is sufficient for more than 90 days, the pharmacy employee must reduce the number of packages dispensed. However, there are exceptions.
Contraceptive pills on one prescription can be found for 6 months of use. However, if the drug prescribed on the prescription is a drug, it must not be used for more than 30 days of use. In addition, prescriptions with "deferred" delivery times are an increasingly common phenomenon. Then, at the bottom of the prescription, under the "date of issue", there is also the "date of fulfillment from".
Each of these prescriptions may contain the amount of medication needed for 30 days of therapy. A frequent oversight of doctors is also the lack of dosage of the drug on the prescription. In this case, the pharmacist can only dispense the two smallest packages. The pharmacist cannot make up for the missing dosage - this error must be corrected by the prescribing doctor.
Properly written recipe: stamps, prints, stickers
When leaving the doctor's office, it is worth checking if the prescription has all the necessary stamps. The data of the he althcare provider (clinic or private practitioner) must be included in the header of the prescription. They can be applied with a stamp, an imprint or in the form of a sticker.
In turn, at the very bottom of the prescription should be the details of the person who issued it (name, surname and number of the license to practice the profession). This information can also be applied by means of a stamp, an imprint or a sticker. However, it is important that the doctor's signature is also included here. The doctor's stamp is therealso necessary in case of any corrections made to the prescription. Each deletion, bold or additional text must be authorized with the personal stamp of the doctor and his signature. Otherwise, the pharmacist has the right to consider such interference with the prescription as a forgery and refuse to carry it out.
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