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Home Health & Hospice Week

Regulations:

Create A Policy To Take Back Patients' Unused Controlled Drugs Safely

Published on Tue Aug 18, 2009

You can protect family members from drugrelated accidents after a patient's death. Scenario: Your hospice patient dies soon after you refill his prescribed medications. Leaving them in the home opens the door to potential drug diversion or accidental poisonings. You can  eliminate this risk by returning for the medication, right? Not so fast. While leaving the meds could be dangerous, getting them out of the house requires a mixture of regulatory and legal know-how, as well as awareness of environmental concerns. Use this advice to protect your patients' family members from harm while also staying within regulatory lines: Reality: Just because you know a deceased patient's scheduled meds are still in his home does not mean you have the right to come in and collect them. "Technically, once the drugs are prescribed and in the patient's home, they are the patient's property,"says Janet Neigh, VP for hospice with the National [...]
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