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Kansas News: What to Do When the Doctor Passes Away, Retires, or Relocates Practice
Published in the March 2006 Kansas State Board of Pharmacy Newsletter
How do you handle refill requests when a prescriber passes away, retires, or relocates his or her practice? The Kansas Board of Pharmacy and Kansas Board of Healing Arts have no regulations pertaining to the number of refills allowed under these circumstances.
The following response to the issue was provided by the Office of Drugs, the National Center for Drugs, and the Biologics, Food and Drug Administration. It is well established that a prescription of a practitioner given to a patient signifies generally that a physician/patient relationship exists. This relationship also connotes that during the life of that prescription, the patient is under the practitioner’s professional care and includes the number of authorized refills. It is our opinion that once a physician/patient relationship is broken, the prescription loses its validity since the physician is no longer available to treat the patient and oversee his [or] her use of the prescribed drug(s). The Kansas State Board of Pharmacy recommends that if the pharmacist is aware of the situation, the pharmacist should counsel the patient to seek a new physician immediately. The patient should be able to obtain a sufficient amount of prescribed drug of any unexpired prescription to carry over until the services of another physician are obtained. In some cases, obtaining the services of another physician may take 60 days or longer. The key to this issue is the pharmacist’s professional judgement. As stated in K.S.A. 65-1637, the pharmacist can refuse to refill any prescription if, in the pharmacist’s professional judgement and discretion, the prescription should not be refilled.
