A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions and the School of Emergent Priorities tracks 412 pharmacy owings to their ends and describes the slip of paper that carries each one.
Every part-supplied prescription in three community pharmacies is tracked for fourteen weeks, from the short shelf to the counter
Four hundred and twelve times in fourteen weeks, one of three community pharmacies handed a patient part of a prescription and wrote down that it owed the rest. Each of those debts has now been followed to its end. The Balance to Follow: Owing slips and the part-supplied prescription in three community dispensaries is a paper by Associate Professor Ragnhild Uzoma, Associate Professor and Lead of the Basement Relations Group, Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, and Dr Petra Umbile, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Emergent Priorities.
The missing tablets, the authors report, were usually on the premises by the next working day. The made-up balance then waited a median of five further days on a shelf. Nearly four in five owings ended with the patient holding the remainder; 38 were returned to stock uncollected, and one pharmacy was found to be keeping 37 slips from before the study began.
I have spent a career on what does not come up out of the ground. It was a courtesy of the profession to let me count what had not yet gone out over the counter.
— Associate Professor Ragnhild Uzoma, Lead of the Basement Relations Group
The paper pairs a staff-kept log with field observation and interviews, and brings the dispensary’s paper, shelf and software into a single account of how an unfinished supply changes hands. It offers no recommendation about supply.
The University counts the readiness of its schools to be useful outside their own buildings among the quieter returns on its research settings. Dr Umbile said the three pharmacies had “been generous with a part of the day they did not think anyone would want”.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.wshmsw.