The pharmacy system is in a P.G. man's doghouse after he was nearly prescribed his pet's medication.
Rick Gillingham is dogged by headaches. He does his best to stay away from medication so it is more effective when they get severe, but when he went in to university hospital for a simple painkiller recently, the doctor started asking him questions about his cancer.
"I told him I don't have cancer, and he kept telling me not to be coy, that nobody was within earshot so it was all right to talk about it and he needed to know, and I kept insisting," Gillingham told The Citizen.
Trying to get to the bottom of the confusion, Gillingham asked about the chart the doctor was referring to, wondering if it was his father's old chart.
Eventually, Gillingham's girlfriend Charlaine MacGillivray caught the gist of the conversation and stormed in from the waiting area to find out why he had withheld such important information. Although he denied it, MacGillivary was not deterred.
"She was saying things like 'They are professionals, they don't make these kind of mistakes.' And I really didn't know what to tell her. I was at a loss for words," he said.
"As we were yakking about it, the physician piped up and said 'Well if you're not the one taking the phenobarbital, who is?' And as soon as he said that the light went on for her. It was for the dog, not for me. I didn't even remember the name of the dog's stuff, but she did and it all clicked."
The family dog Cooper had canine epilepsy and the veterinarian had prescribed phenobarbital to ease the condition.
When the dog's meds were entered into the province-wide PharmaNet system, and Gillingham's meds were entered into the same system, there was nothing to signal they were different individuals.
Adding to the confusion, the vet's name is identical to a well-known cancer specialist and nothing identified the different medical specialities.
"If [Rick ingested the dog's drugs] it would probably not have been harmful but if someone else had this happen, it could be life-threatening," said MacGillivray. "There should be some way of knowing the difference at a glance between human medication and animal meds. This is scary stuff. You'd think you and your pet would have different numbers or codes or something."
B.C.'s assistant deputy minister (pharmaceutical services) with the Ministry of Health agreed.
"This can have significant patient safety issues," agreed Bob Nakagawa.
He said a mix-up of this nature rarely happens and there are built-in safeguards to ensure cross-medicating doesn't occur.
"We requested the College of Pharmacists of B.C. investigate this matter and they had discussions with the pharmacy manager and the dispensing pharmacist. The college found that the reason the phenobarbital showed up under the medication history rather than the veterinarian history is because the pharmacy filled the phenobarbital using the pharmacist's name/ID as prescriber.
"The pharmacist indicated that the medication was an emergency supply as you had come in wanting a supply of medication, and the pharmacy tried but was unable to contact the veterinary office at the time. The pharmacist is now fully aware that prescriptions for pets should not be processed under a prescriber other than a veterinarian."
Gillingham would like the provincial stakeholders in the PharmaNet system to study ways of adding protections so human errors, although rare, can not happen.
