From HealthNewsDigest.com

Medicine
Going To Great Lengths (and Miles) to Find New Home for Unused Medicine
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Jan 9, 2018 - 3:25:53 PM

(HealthNewsDigest.com) - The patient had just finished his last round of chemotherapy and radiation treatment at Mayo Clinic's Rochester campus and was scheduled to fly back to his home overseas the next day. He still had several doses of the blood thinning medication he'd taken during his treatment. Unable to take it home with him, the patient decided to bring it back to his Mayo Clinic care team to see if it could be of use to someone else.

"I've never had a patient come in and bring me medicine before," Terri Lang, a physician assistant in Mayo Clinic's Vascular Center, tells us. "But he had a bunch of it left, and since it's so terribly expensive and prepackaged in syringes, he couldn't really take it home with him. So he just brought it in and gave it to me and said, 'Surely you can find some patient who can use this.' It was about $3,000 worth of medication."

Lang found a safe place for the valuable treasure in the Vascular Center's locked medication cabinet. Then she began trying to find it a new home. Even though the medication would be donated, it would need to be dispensed by a pharmacy. "Some pharmacies will take back certain medications that haven't been used," she says. Most often, those are expensive medications used to treat cancer. Mayo's pharmacies in Rochester, unfortunately, weren't able to take back the medication.

"Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin all have laws on the books saying they can take back medicine, but Minnesota doesn't have an actual program in place even though it is legal here," she says. Lang wasn't willing to give up her quest, however, and eventually found a taker. "I found a pharmacy in La Crosse, Wisconsin, that said they'd be happy to take the medicine back. The only catch was I had to bring it in during working hours."

That didn't end up being much of a catch after Lang learned the pharmacy was open until 12:30 p.m. every Saturday. She and a friend — who also works at Mayo — decided to take "a road trip there one Saturday morning to take the medicine in to them," Lang says. "I was able to document that it had been stored properly, and then properly sign it in to them, and they were happy to receive it."

Almost as happy, it seems, as Lang was to give it to them to pass along to someone in need. "I'm really glad we got to do it and that this medication can now be used by someone else," she says. "And others might consider doing the same thing if they have medications that are expensive and they also don’t want to throw them away."

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