Medicine poppers / blister packs / dispensers / help my frayed nerves as I Hoover up the tramadol out of reach of tiny hands !

[isoldeone]

Can anyone help ?

My mum is on a cocktail of pills ( 10 or more) plus recently taking statins. The chemist now packs her prescription into an am / pm blister card . This avoided the problem of the bags and bags of individual blister packs . However.. She finds it difficult to manipulate the pills out the card with the result the odd tiny teeny statin ( no bigger than a sweetener) , tramadol get dropped and are missed .

When we visit I now do a sweep first thing , 4 year old is instructed not touch anything and after once finding a tramadol under the armchair I am allowed to Hoover and check ( this caused much upset and ructions , I had to gently show her the evidence despite protests - " I'm careful !" My 6 month is on the verge of crawling. Of course I minimise risk as much as possible , travel cots as playpens, double check floors ( hard to do subtly and unsubtly so ........

I need to also find where they sell a blister pack opener cum dispenser for the prescription cards . Mum explains this where she falls down on opening and checking she has all her pills . Does such a thing exist ? ( I don't mean the ones for individual pills . Internet search has drawn a blank.

Mnetters help my frayed nerves and help avert what could potentially be disaster or tragedy. ..:(

Would it be possible to get most stuff in the blister pack, and the two small tablets in their own blister or bottle?

Or would something like this cope with the numbers involved?

Thanks I've found similar and that link too
Next phase it's an option I suppose but I've no idea if the chemist would do that.
Anything that's a faff or different is immediately poo- pooed and I really feel that sometimes she is forgetting Trouble is she sometimes pinches the sleeping pill from the next pm blister too and that is where things are going wrong too. She was blasé about meds before the stroke and memory loss !

I want exactly what your link shows but for a whole day blister !

Well, what happens if you place a repeat for all the drugs except the ones causing the issues, and then a week later, the two tinies? Thats then not asking the chemist to do anything different??
Pinching the sleeping tablet??? ie she wants double dose some days? Sounds dangerous. What does she do the next night?
Were at the same stage with my grandmother, but she is refusing blister packs, so noone has any ideas on number of occasions she takes double / none........

That link looks like it will do slightly bigger than one blister. But I guess a 10 pill blister is quite big.....

My mother helps my father now to prepare his weeks supply of pills into the pill dividers that are days of he week and then split into 3 morning , noon, and evening. He then tips out into his hand or an egg cup the pills and washes them down.
You can also get ones that are more sophisticated.
The pain is the pill dividing weekly .

Yes the sleeping pills are of great concern to me to . Since I was a teenagers you could be guaranteed to find halves and quarters in random places . I've rung the gp and stated my concerns that " the wheels are slowly falling off " but mum is compos mentis and we live 50 miles away. Mum doesn't want ss help . A year ago she went abroad with my dad to Greece . Her decline had been intense since my fathers death and with reception aged child and a tiny I'm out if ideas until the next crisis forces something . This is another " sticking plaster " on a crappy situation .

The buy your way out of it solution is to buy a safe from B&Q/Homebase. You can get one just large enough for blister packs and then have an agency carer coming in every day for 15/30 mins to "prompt".

The morning pills are then taken immediately and the afternoon pills are left out in a saucer. Not sure when they are taken but they are.

If your mother is not receipt of daily attendance allowance this allowance will cover the cost. And attendance allowance is often the key to unlocking Council Tax exemption due to severe mental impairment. My mum has responded extraordinarily well to Aricept, and I assume compliance has helped. She hates the carer coming in, as it reminds her she needs help. However a small price to pay and it gives a focus for her complaint.

Is there scope for the GP to review her medication to ensure she only has to take the most important and to see how many of these can be taken at one time?

There have been so many problems for which sticking plaster solutions have been needed.

I found a lovely opener for daily blister packs - but alas only available in Oz. Dad tells me he opens mums (5 sets of tablets a day) by piercing with a knife and then turning over on a cereal bowl. If your mums sight isn't so good, a dark bowl would help in seeing them.

Your mum does sound like she's on a lot of medicines, some of which really aren't memory loss compatible as tablets, and obviously long term use of sleeping tablets and tramadol aren't going to help her cognition. A medicine review might be useful to look at what could be changed around and if its time to drop some

Thank you so much for your advice. It really helps. Frustratingly I can see all these things coming up on the horizon but my mum won't have it. All I can do is plan and research accordingly but because it takes an incident for her to accept anything . The dark bowl is a great idea , thanks cmot