Medication handover record

What this is for

The moment somebody else has your child for the day and there’s medicine involved, the information tends to travel by doorstep conversation. You say the words, they nod, and four hours later nobody is completely certain whether the Calpol was at nine or half past ten.

The first time I handed my daughter over with antibiotics I wrote the times on the back of a receipt, which lasted until somebody put the kettle down on it. This is one sheet of paper that stops that happening. You fill in the top half before you go, it travels with the medicine, and the person in charge carries on in the same table.

The log is the whole thing

There’s one table for doses rather than two. You start it with anything given at home before the handover, and whoever takes over simply keeps going.

That matters more than it sounds. A separate “what I gave” box and “what you gave” box means somebody has to read across both and do a sum, usually while holding a child who isn’t at their best. One list, in time order, with a column saying when the next dose is allowed, removes the sum entirely.

Send it in the original box

With the pharmacy label still on it. Schools and nurseries aren’t allowed to accept medicine that has been decanted into something smaller, and they can’t change a prescribed dose. The same logic applies at a grandparent’s house, where the label is the only way anyone can check what they’re about to give.

Two words about schools

Your school or nursery will have its own medicines policy and its own consent form, and theirs comes first. That’s a legal requirement rather than institutional fussiness, and no printable off the internet overrides it.

Where this sheet earns its place is everywhere else. Grandparents, childminders, sitters, football clubs, holiday clubs, the friend doing the school run for a week. Those handovers usually have no paperwork at all, which is precisely where the mistakes happen.

What it deliberately doesn’t do

It won’t help you work out a dose, and it says so on the front. The dose comes off the current pharmacy label, copied exactly, and nothing on this page is a substitute for that.

If a dose has been missed, repeated, or you simply aren’t sure what happened, ring a pharmacist, your GP, or NHS 111. They would far rather have the call than not. In an emergency, 999.

When the day is over

The sheet comes home. There’s a box for that, because otherwise it lives in a bag at the club until half term.

If it is a babysitter or a grandparent doing the day rather than a club, the babysitter and emergency information sheet covers everything this one does not.

Then get rid of it properly. It has your child’s name, date of birth, allergies and medication on it, which isn’t something to leave in a recycling box on the pavement.