Lyn: Travelling with multiple medicines – Medicines mistakes and accidents whilst travelling
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Lyn
Female
Age at interview: 67
Number of medicines: 1
Cultural background: British-Australian
Lyn and her husband have been in two accidental situations with their medicines while travelling, one in Australia and one overseas. She describes what they did to remedy each situation.
Once we had a caravan and we were travelling around Australia a bit and we got to [a rural town in Queensland], I think it was, and I had run out of a particular medication. I thought I had a script and I didn't. So, I went to the doctor … the doctor's office and they said, ‘Oh, he won't be here for another week.’ We didn't want to be staying in [the town] for a week, so I went to the pharmacist and told them my story and they said, ‘Look, we'll give you the tablets. We will ring your GP and get them to fax a prescription through’ and that’s what happened. That was one time in my life when I'd actually not realised that I didn't have enough tablets to take with me, so it was very helpful …
We were in Hong Kong and he hadn't calculated the right amount of tablets and he ran out of his blood pressure tablets. I said, ‘Look, you really need to get some. They're important.’ Luckily, there was a doctor's surgery underneath the hotel we were staying in. He went down and told the doctor what he was taking. Told him how many he needed before he got back to Australia and he just gave him, I think, seven tablets in a bag with a little note to say what they were. So he actually ... there was no pharmacy. They were actually in the doctor's surgery. So he did manage that, but whether that would be applicable to all medications, I would be a little bit hesitant in saying, ‘They have everything that people take.’ But we were just lucky.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.