Can you take penicillin every 3/4 hours?

[lyssie29]

Gp said for my 6 yr old to take it 4 times a day. Can I do it every 3/4 hours or do I need to leave longer inbetween? I just never thought to ask and I've looked online and some say 6 hours and some say as long as you evenly space it out so I'm confused.

[NotAlwaysRight]

Work out the hours they're awake and divide it by 4 doses.

So for my 6 year old it was awake at 6:30am and then he went to bed at 7:30pm.

Those were his first and last doses.

The other two were spaced out as evenly as possible, so roughly around 11am (4.5hrs later), and then again at 3pm (4 hrs later), leading it to a final wait of 4.5 hours until the bedtime dose at 7:30pm

[NotAlwaysRight]

In a perfect world you'd do it ever 6 hours to have a constant supply of penicillin in the body, but they don't even do that in hospital (no one is woken at midnight for oral antibiotics) and that's why they say try to space it as evenly as possible instead.

It's not like paracetamol where you need to watch 4 hours to clear your body between dose.