Pilot study: a review on Acute Pain Service (APS) medications used in Hospital Putrajaya

A pilot study about a review on the usage of Acute Pain Service (APS) has been done. This study focuses on analysis of the returned APS medications to the pharmacy of Hospital Putrajaya and the cost of raw materials and consumable for each of unused or returned APS medications. The medications were returned in a way, where the expired medications will be checked by the pharmacist and the nurse or staff has to complete the return APS form. Then, the form and expired medications will be submitted to the in-patient pharmacy and the pharmacist will update the APS book and keep a copy of the APS return form as a record. All the returned medications were collected and sorted out based on Ministry of Health guideline standards and the data period was from January to December 2013. From the result, 346 units of APS medications were returned throughout the year 2013. All the medications were separated into five different medications which are PCA morphine lmg/ml, epidural cocktail 0.1%, epidural cocktail 0.05%, epidural cocktail 0.2% and epidural ropivacaine 0.2% plain. From these five APS medications, the epidural cocktail 0.1% has the highest number of medications returned with 106 units and the least was epidural ropivacaine 0.2% plain with 44 units. It showed that August 2013, with 56 units of medications, has the highest number of medications returned and the lowest is April 2013 with 8 units respectively. The total cost that has been wasted from all the APS medications returned is RM 16, 163.50.