Skill Group: Clinical Pharmacology and Hospital Management
Writing a Prescription
Before You Start …
Before you begin this lesson, you should first master the skills covered in lessons 1 and 2, including conversion from pounds to kilograms and calculating drug doses.
Introduction
In the previous lessons, you have learned to convert calculate drug doses based on bodyweight and standard guidelines and available forms of the medication.
In this lesson, you will learn how to fill out a prescription form for those medications, whether they are filled within the VMC or at an outside pharmacy. There are a number of regulatory and legal elements to the proper completion of a prescription and they will also be reviewed in this and upcoming modules.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this lesson, you should be able to:
- List the Important parts of a properly written prescription.
- Fill out a prescription form according to OSU VMC guidelines.
- Fill out a prescription form for outside practices.
- Identify key legal guidelines of prescription writing.
Parts of the Prescription
Video: Writing a Prescription
The following are essential parts of any drug prescription: Date, Patient name, Medical record number, Weight, Species, Age, Drug name, Drug form and concentration, Number of tablets/capsules/milliliters/etc., and Dosing instructions.
A veterinarian must sign the prescription if the medication is a controlled substance or it is going home with a patient.
Use the activity below to visualize a sample prescription using the form used at the OSU Veterinary Medical Center:
Practice Time!
Practice Time!
Wrapping Up
In this lesson, you learned to write a prescription. In the next lesson, you will learn how to dispense that prescription.
Before Moving On …
Use the self-check activity below to practice writing a prescription, given information from the clinician.
(Coming soon!)
OSU Students: Successful completion of this lesson may require an associated activity in the course(s) that incorporate(s) this lesson.