Why Do You Have to Confirm Bottle Balances Every Morning?
Every state has laws about drug logging controlled substances. At a minimum, you must verify the total of drugs you are beginning your day with. Here’s why.
- Preventing theft: You will be documenting that the confirmed bottle balances for controlled substances that were documented the evening before are the same bottle balances the next morning. Why would you need to do this? What you are doing here is guarding against the unlikely risk that someone snuck in in the middle of the night and took out some mLs out of the controlled substance bottles. This is very unlikely of course, but, you eliminate this risk by verifying the controlled substance drugs every morning.
- Staring out right: The second thing you are doing is documenting the daily starting values for controlled substance bottles. This is required by law for every state for every veterinary clinic that uses controlled substances. By doing this you are meeting the letter of the law, but you are also starting out “math-wise” on good footing. As you progress through your day, you and HQ will be drawing drugs out of the bottles. As you draw, it’s a simple math calculation that deducts the amount you are drawing down. If you start your day correctly, the math at the end of the day will be correct.
What are you looking at, when you’re looking at this pop up?
The first thing you’re doing is looking at all the open controlled substance bottles in your safe. Any OPEN CONTROLLED SUBSTANCE bottle should be in this list presented above.
You pull them out of the safe, verify the total that is in the computer system is about what is in the bottle itself.
But, how do we confirm the amount in HQ is in the bottle?
Short of actually drawing it out of the bottle (which is not practical and can introduce bacteria into the bottle) you actually confirm the _exact _amount in the bottle. And that’s okay, you don’t really need to, it just needs to be pretty close. You can do one of two things to confirm the starting AM amounts: eyeball it or use a drug bottle ruler. If there’s supposed to be 3 mLs in a bottle it’s fairly easy for a practiced veterinarian or technician to eye ball it and say “Yep, there’s about 3 mLs in the bottle.” Or, if you prefer, you can use a drug bottle ruler to confirm the amount in the bottle is pretty close to the amount in HQ.
What if the value in the bottle not the same as what is in HQ during the AM check?
The AM value is a copy of the day before’s PM value, when the drug log was finalized. So there are only two logical answers.
1. Someone took some mLs out in the middle of night. This would be considered theft.
2. The PM person finalized the drug log without confirming the PM values. This is unacceptable. The PM person should be looking at the bottle amounts and looking at HQ, and should not finalize the drug log until what is in the bottles is about what is in the computer.
