Hospital highlights - July 29, 2010

Safety and convenience

“Safety First!” is a noble idea that can be inconvenient to live by 100% of the time. While excellent patient safety is our goal at WHMC, we are working to ensure we implement new safety measures as unobtrusively as possible.

For example, we recently changed a policy regarding patients using their personally-owned medications brought from home when their insurance or Medicare will not cover their medications. While patients are in the hospital we are legally and morally responsible for their well being. If a person brings their unknown personal medications with them we lose some of our ability to ensure their safety. In fact, some hospitals do not allow any personally owned medications to be brought into the hospital. We realize this can be unsettling and costly to our patients so we have crafted a way to ensure safety while minimizing the inconvenience.

First, there must be a specific physician order for the medication. Next, the medication must be in its original pharmacy container. Finally, our pharmacist will verify the medication and label it; if it can not be verified it will not be used. After hours verification for essential medications may be done remotely via tele-pharmacy. Medications that can be treated this way include items not stocked in our pharmacy, oral contraceptives and short-term items started prior to admission such as antibiotics. Patient-owned narcotics, over-the-counter and herbal supplements cannot be used.

We are committed to implementing the best practices for patient safety in a customer sensitive manner. If you have questions about our personally owned medication policy or any patient safety topic, please contact us.

David E. Womack

Chief Executive Officer

Whitman Hospital & Medical Center