Following a meeting with Humankind / STARS we agreed it would be helpful to remind pharmacies of the following message to improve patient care and help minimise harm to patients:
- If a pharmacy becomes aware of a patient receiving therapy on a blue form (eg supervised methadone) being admitted to hospital, then the pharmacy should inform STARS immediately and PAUSE the prescription. The prescription should ONLY be restarted on advice from STARS.
- Please be aware of the three day rule and remember to inform STARS if a patient misses 2 days of doses.
- If the pharmacy receives a batch of prescriptions, say 5 weeks, this does not mean that the client has an appointment in about 5 weeks time as there is very likely to be an interim appointments. Consequently if asked “when does my prescription run out?” Please advise client to contact STARS for their next appointment as opposed to saying "you have x weeks left on your prescription." - STARS have detected that patients sometime believe they do not need to attend interim appointments once they have a batch of prescriptions at the pharmacy.
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