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Doctor's lobby prepares fresh dispensing rules

Fresh guidelines for the safe dispensing of medicine by doctors are to be presented on Friday to a new task force of the Hong Kong Medical Council.

The proposals, drawn up by the powerful doctors' lobby group the Hong Kong Medical Association, come in the wake of the deadly drug mix-up in which patients with stomach problems were mistakenly given gliclazide, a diabetes medication. Four died.

The blunder sparked a public outcry and calls for doctors to leave the dispensing of drugs to pharmacists.

One of the task force's members, Choi Kin, who is also president of the Hong Kong Medical Association, said the association is formulating new guidelines in time for Friday's meeting 'to help the doctors to do better dispensing and to upgrade their dispensing skills'. The guidelines are being prepared by the association's separate, long-standing task force on drug dispensing.

'[This shows] we want to improve the profession and we want to make sure that the profession dispenses medications properly,' Dr Choi said. 'I will take this to the Medical Council on Friday so that they can use it instead of wasting time creating another set of guidelines.'

The chairman of the HKMA task force on drug dispensing, Cheng Chi-man, said not only would the guidelines be presented to the Medical Council's group for consideration but they would be distributed to all 8,000 association members and put online to serve as a constant reminder of good practices.

'[Guidelines] will comprise mainly the protocol of the logistics of how to prevent mixing up of medication, how to check everything because sometimes theory is different from practice,' Dr Cheng said. 'We need to specify what kind of steps they can take to minimise the chance of mixing up medications,' he said.

Investigations into the gliclazide blunder, in which 152 patients of Wong Tai Sin doctor Ronald Li Sai-lai were given the wrong medicine, are focusing on how the drug was mislabelled, and why it took almost five months to be revealed.

The problem began on January 3, but went unnoticed until three patients seen by Dr Li were admitted to Queen Elizabeth Hospital last month. It took until May 27 before the Department of Health was notified and an alert put out to track down the affected patients.

The error caused low blood-sugar in 65 patients, sending 18 to hospital. Four died and one remains in hospital, her condition undisclosed.

The Medical Council, responsible for the registration of doctors and for medical ethics, maintains control of clinics through its renewal of doctors' licences each year.

Its task force is chaired by David Fang Jin-sheng, chairman of the Medical Council's ethics committee and medical superintendent of the private St Paul's Hospital.

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