What can be said that hasn’t already been said about poisoning due to mixing medication incorrectly? A lot, I discovered.

I found myself in a pharmacy the other day talking to strangers (as I’m prone to do). I was searching for our latest campaign (see photo) when a nice older lady asked me what I was doing. I told her about Preventable and how poisoning due to incorrectly mixing medication affects more than 20,000 British Columbians each year and that more than half are children less than six years of age (BC Drug and Poison Information Centre, 2009). She asked me how to avoid these poisonings, and I told her that one way is to read the packaging carefully, including the warnings regarding acceptable doses. Thinking I’d done my job informing another British Columbian about a preventable injury, I started to walk away. But then something unexpected happened.

“Reading the label is easy if you can find it,” she said.

This lady gave me some insight into the challenges of making sure your don’t poison yourself by mixing medications incorrectly. She told me that sometimes medication directions are on the inside of the box, not on the actual bottle of medications itself. This elderly woman said that she usually throws the boxes away, thinking they’re of no use to her and not knowing at the time that she’s thrown out the medication directions.

If our knowledgeable senior citizens can’t figure out which medications can be poisonous, then how can we expect kids to know any better? And with painkiller overdoses on the rise in Canada, handling medications properly is a subject that’s becoming increasingly more important.

What are your concerns about safety and medication?.