Why You Need An Accurate Medication List
Of course you need an accurate medication list – it seems obvious that you don’t need an inaccurate one!
Getting your meds right, especially if you’re going into the hospital or sharing your list with a new healthcare professional is important. You can’t always depend on the government pharma listings to provide an accurate and current list, especially if your meds and dosages change regularly.
We began by listing Tony’s medications on his one-page personal health summary. Providing an accurate medication list to paramedics whenever we had to call 911 before his lung transplant was what spurred Tony to create the one-pager in the first place. If you don’t have a lot of meds, keeping the list on your personal health summary is probably not a bad idea – the less paperwork the better. We moved Tony’s medication list to a spreadsheet format when two things started happening:
- His medication schedule became complicated after the transplant – timing of his meds is important and he takes meds 4x/day.
- Getting his medications ‘reconciled’ correctly whenever he is hospitalized is difficult. He has changes to his meds frequently enough that the goverment’s pharma list isn’t always accurate, and there were too many instances of timing and dosage issues whenever he was hospitalized.
So we stole adopted the spreadsheet format we saw the hospital using – figuring that if we provided the information in a format they were used to it would improve things. It’s still an issue – but less so. It’s also really handy to have a printed version to hand over to new doctors when they want you to list your meds – Tony has enough that we just write ‘see attached sheet’ and attach the printed list. There’s always a print version in his binder and we keep the file on the cloud.
Creating Your Medication List
Download a template for your medication list here:
Using Your Medication List
If you’re like Tony and have a long list, it’s helpful to use this list when you sit down to ‘do’ your meds for the week (or month). You can read more about organizing a medication tracking system here: Did You Take Your Meds: How Our Medication Tracking System Evolved. Next week we’ll take a look at the work we’ve done so far – and focus on the next step… using the binder more regularly to take notes at appointments.
Do you have questions or need a hand with your Medication List? How did you adapt this for your own situation?
