DoctorsBagUK review: keeping the doctor's bag in date

Originally published in GP magazine .

Written for GP magazine around 2009. This is the version I submitted - the published article may have been edited.

How much do you take on visits with you? One of my partners has two huge bags and is equipped to do minor surgery; another GP I know is a BASICS first responder and can deal with a major roadside trauma. This is all too much for me and I only carry the bare minimum, yet we all have the same problem - keeping everything in date and making sure you don’t run out of it.

DoctorsBagUK is a simple idea. The brainchild of a British GP, it is a website on which you can securely record what is in your bag and when it will expire. It allows you to print off what you are carrying and warns you when it is about to go out of date. Registering is easy and it costs £35 a year. It is secure and has the endorsement of the RCGP.

It has a simple interface and is easy to use, though there are a few things I would improve, and it does most of what it sets out to do well. You can quickly enter all the drugs and equipment from your bag, though you need to take care to get the expiry dates and batch numbers right for it to be meaningful. There are three categories to choose from: equipment, drugs and controlled drugs. You can specify form and dose, and for controlled drugs there is even a pick list to choose from. There is a new feature for controlled drugs that allows you to record to whom you have given them and when, and personally I would like to see this feature for all the drugs as an audit trail.

A minor annoyance of the user interface is I would rather click a button that says I used a drug and have it reduce the amount than update it with a lower number. The reminder facility worked well, sending me an email with plenty of time that my drugs were about to expire.

On the whole I recommend it highly, especially to individuals and small practices, though there are a few improvements I would like to see before I try to convince my very large practice to buy it, as 20 x £35 seems too much. I would like to see an enterprise version that allowed, from one login, the tracking and reporting of multiple bags as well as fridges, email alerts to a central person, e.g. practice manager or in our case practice pharmacist, tracking of PPA claims and volume pricing discounts - though I believe the author is thinking about all of these.