Jane: Problems with multiple medicines (II) – ‘Authority required’ medicines
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Jane
Female
Age at interview: 53
Number of medicines: 8
Cultural background: Anglo-Australian
Jane had a lot of problems when her doctor made a mistake with one of her prescriptions requiring authority. It was a frustrating process that took a great deal of her time and effort to have this corrected.
Another difficulty I had had where the script that had been made out for one of my drugs the chemist said was not correct … There was a lot of friction and frustration about that and, with the Ritalin … they keep your scripts. So, once you've got your first script made, you have to keep going back to that chemist and ... this person said, you know, ‘This isn't a legal script.’ And I said, ‘Well, help me understand what it is that I need to have differently to be able to? You know, what's the doctor done wrong?’ ‘Oh, he didn't write these things in numerals.’ So I said ‘Well, can you write down for me what was wrong?’ and he just wrote down ‘numerals’.
So, I went back to the doctor, who wasn't close to the chemist and was tricky to get into see. He said he'd never had trouble with anybody else doing that, and it happened over and over again and at the same place. So, I rang, you know, the lady and said, ‘You know, I don't really think that this is helpful. Why can't you ring the other doctor and work it out. Why does it have to become my problem?’ And ... she put it on file that no matter what happened, no one was ever to question that particular script, and that was a relief for me. So I thought, well, I'll have to keep going back to the same place and I did have to say to people, ‘Your manager said to look at my file and it's OK.’ I found that really very hard.
I didn't ever imagine that I would have arguments with, arguments at the chemist about whether or not I was entitled to have it or whether the script had been correctly written or not.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.