The Allese 21 birth control pill recall by Shoppers Drug Mart highlights the need for pharmacists to manually check expiry dates, a pharmacy safety group says.
Expired medications, both prescription and non-prescription, should be taken off the shelf before they have a chance of reaching consumers, said Phil Emberley, director of pharmacy innovation at Canadian Pharmacists Association in Ottawa.
“In a well-run pharmacy and drug store, there is a procedure for ensuring expired drug products are taken off the shelf before they expire,” Emberley said.
“Consumers would not find expired product if they were to go, if they were to pick a product from the shelf. Further, in the dispensary part, there would be a fairly routine procedure, for example, once a month, to identify products that were soon to expire so that they would not be inadvertently dispensed by someone.”
Regarding the Alesse recall, Emberley speculated that pharmacists made an assumption about newly arrived stock.
“They may have assumed it was well within its expiry, when in fact it arrived at the store already expired. I think there may have been that false sense of comfort that this product was still dispensable, when in fact it wasn’t.”
Shoppers Drug Mart said it is reviewing its practices to prevent a recurrence.
Manual checks needed
Julie Greenall, director of projects and education at the Institute for Safe Medication Practice Canada, said the Allese recall illustrates how technology is not fail-safe and manual checks of expiry dates by pharmacists remain paramount.
“I think as we move to electronic systems that we do have an increasing reliance on those electronic systems and also we sort of take that for granted that that’s already checked,” Greenall said.
Currently, electronic inventory systems may include the drug name and strength in the bar code, but not the lot number and expiry date, an advance Greenall expects will come.
After Shoppers Drug Mart recalled one lot of Alesse 21 birth control pills that expired in September 2014, a viewer in Richmond, B.C., sent CBC News a photo of a newly purchased non-prescription allergy medication stamped with an expiry date of October 2014. A CBC producer found more on the shelf at the same store.
When CBC News checked a dozen drug stores from three chains in Toronto, journalists found a diabetic nutritional supplement expired last October, other past due allergy medications, an expired sleep medication and a number of products that expire this month.
“There have been a number of studies done on expired medications that have found that they do tend to hold their potency over extended periods of time, but every medication is different. What we do know is that expired medications are unlikely to be harmful,” Greenall said.
Given that pharmacists are fallible, Greenall’s institute recommends ways to prevent errors, including:
An alphanumeric system for expiry dates that includes letters to make the numbers stand out.
Expiry labels with the full four digits for the year.
Printing EXP clearly to indicate the expiry date rather than the lot number.
Have consumers check the expiry date themselves when possible.
The pharmacy chains did not respond to CBC News’s requests for comment about their expired non-prescription products.
