Sedative Prescribing for Scans Being Performed in a Hospital Setting
Last Updated: Tuesday, 23 April 2024The Surgery has a policy not to prescribe sedation of any kind for patients undergoing scans or investigations in a hospital setting.
The responsibility for any prescribing of medication required for a scan or investigation being performed in a hospital setting rests with the clinician in charge of or overseeing that investigation.
In law, the responsibility for any adverse reaction or outcome from a medication rests with the person who has prescribed that medication. We believe is it neither safe, nor appropriate to prescribe sedatives to be taken by a patient prior to an investigation where we will not be present, or which we will not have any control over.
Patients can respond very differently to the same dose of sedative and can either be particularly sensitive to these drugs and become over sedated, or react to them and become agitated, both of which are potentially unsafe.
For this reason we believe that the prescription of and any monitoring of the effects of sedatives in the hospital should be done a clinician who is with, or has clinical responsibility for the patient at the time they are being taken.
The Royal College of Radiologists has published its own guidance “Safe Sedation and analgesia in the radiology department (2018)”, which in its summary states:
“Sedation techniques, together with good analgesia and sympathetic, supportive patient management can improve the patients’ experience by minimising the negative effects of the intervention and optimising patient outcome.
Safe and effective analgesia and sedation should be delivered by an appropriately trained and credentialed team with good access to anaesthetics, pre-procedure assessment, sedation plan and checklist, with appropriate monitoring and availability of resuscitation equipment and reversal agents”.
This document can be found online at:
Yours sincerely,
DR DM CALLOW, DR EH BALL, MRS K WHITE, DR S LINDSAY