Specifying Script Quantities

[Revised Aug 99]

 With most scripts, the quantity to enter is obvious, 16 Amoxil 250mg Caps, 100ml Amoxil suspension, 15g Bactroban.

However, on some scripts it is not, an Insulin script might consist of 1 pack of 10 ampoules each of 10ml and each ml containing 100 units. RxOne will not be able to interpret which is the unit.

 The pharmacist needs to be able to be confident of how the quantity will be interpreted, so the Pharmacy program always treats quantities as Gram, Ml, or count unless labelled 'p' for packs.

Therefore '15 Ointment' is always interpreted as '15g Ointment', while '15p Ointment' will translate into 225g Ointment', assuming it comes in 15g tubes.

There are checks for reasonableness that can often intercept something that is being misinterpreted, e.g. '5 Aerosol' will automatically be interpreted as 5 packs and come up as '1000 [dose] Aerosol' since a 200 dose Aerosol is impossible to break down. Some cases, such as '2 Ferrum injection' are impossible to deduce since either '2ml' or '2 x 2ml' are reasonable. But it is better to enter '5p Aerosol' and be certain of getting the correct result rather than relying on the computer to deduce it.