The father of a man who died from a prescription drug overdose hopes a coronial inquest will push for the national rollout of an electronic database to monitor the prescription history of patients before drugs are dispensed.
Perth man Daniel Hall, 26, died in 2010 after overdosing on OxyContin, which is also known as ‘hillbilly heroin’.
His father Murray Hall said Daniel, who had a history of prescription drug abuse, had been prescribed the painkiller after day surgery on his nose.
“I spoke to him Friday afternoon and everything was good as gold,” he said.
“Something went badly wrong Friday night to 10:00am Saturday and at about 12:00pm on the Saturday his mother realised it was a bit quiet.
“She went into his room and he had passed away.”
An inquest, which begins Monday in the Coroner’s Court of Western Australia, will look at the deaths of three men, including Daniel, who overdosed on prescription drugs.
It will also examine the importance of doctors and pharmacists being able to access patient drug history in real time.
The Australian Medical Association of Western Australia said a national, real-time reporting database, the Electronic Recording and Reporting of Controlled Drugs system, was operational and ready to monitor patient use of medications such as OxyContin.
But AMA WA immediate past president Richard Choong said states and territories had not started using it.
“That is, I think, some years away and serious investment needs to be put into the system to allow that actually to be evolved and to occur,” Dr Choong said.
“I presume that the end result [of the inquest] is what we’ve always been asking for, a better system where we can monitor the use of these medications and the dispensing of these medications for the benefit of the patient.”
Mr Hall said an electronic database may have saved his son life.
“If you or I go into the chemist to buy cold and flu tablets, we need to produce a form of identification that says who we are,” he said.
“The chemist will tell you immediately whether you’ve been down to the chemist down the road to buy that [drug] that day and he’d probably decline to sell it to you.
“With things like OxyContin, that doesn’t happen.
“There needs to be a really big tidy up of that area also, it’s an alertness to everyone and a tidy up that this can’t be quite so easily dispensed or distributed.”
‘National system would save lives’
Dr Choong said a national system would save lives.
“There are a lot of scripts written for morphine and valium-based drugs but it’s very difficult to track an individual patient in real time.
“We might find out that we wrote a script for a patient that is actually a drug user, but we might find out weeks or months after the script is written because the information’s not in real time and that’s a huge barrier for dispensing and one everyone’s trying to work on.”
Mr Hall said his son would not have intended to harm himself.
“I think he made a mistake,” Mr Hall said.
“He was a very lovable sort of guy, very friendly, a bit like a big, warm teddy bear.
“Make it harder, make it obvious, make it in real time what this person has got or what this person has had. That’s what the pharmacist needs to know too.”
The inquest will hear from expert witnesses including a toxicologist, a specialist in pain medicine and representatives from the Pharmacy Guild of Australia and the Western Australian Alcohol and Drug Authority.