Kerala Pharmacists Organisation has called upon the State government to enforce stringently the Pharmacy Practice Regulations introduced last year by the Pharmacy Council of India, which primarily seeks to weed out non-qualified persons from dispensing drugs and thereby prevent a host of complications caused by wrong dispensing.
Organisation secretary M.P. Premji said most of the drug stores, including those in big hospitals, had employed non-qualified or under-qualified persons to dispense drugs. Nurses dispensed drugs from pharmacies at many hospitals, which was illegal.
Errors in prescription could be detected and corrected only by a qualified and experienced pharmacist. Non-pharmacist dispensers could prove disastrous in such instances. It would be equally disastrous if they dispensed drugs without prescription, going by only symptoms that the patient said.
For instance, codeine phosphate syrup that is prescribed for cough should not be given to persons with lung diseases. It was classified as a narcotic analgesic that acted on the brain to dull the cough reflex (triggered by sensitivity of bronchi/trachea to irritation).
Insisting on prescription
The abuse of codeine phosphate or wrong dispensing could be prevented only by insisting on a prescription from the physician. The syrup was much sought-after by persons who saw it as a safe substitute for alcohol, said Mr. Premji.
“Consuming 100 ml of codeine phosphate amounts to having 180 ml of alcohol. There is no smell. Youngsters find it safe to take this so that they would not be caught for drunk driving,” he pointed out.
“Right from arranging of boxes of drugs on the shelves, checking the cold chain for vaccines and indexing these, it is the task of a qualified pharmacist, and not even of those persons who had undergone a pharmacy assistant course that is, actually, illegal,” Mr. Premji says.
Every registered pharmacist should maintain medical or prescription records of patients for five years. This was to help track prescription or dispensing error in inquiry into drug-induced death or morbidity. In the U.S. or the U.K., prescriptions should be kept safe for seven years.
“At present, we have no chance of tracking such fatal errors because the rules have not been enforced. The government does not seem to be interested in enforcement,” he lamented.
