Medicine chest

FOR-2001-03-09-439 §§ 21, 22 — forskrift om skipsmedisinEvery dispensing shall be recorded by the person dispensing it, and every withdrawal of narcotics shall be entered in the control book. The medicine chest shall undergo expert inspection at least every 12 months, at which the narcotics stock is checked against the control book.

The medicine chest is a small module with an unusually sharp edge: it holds controlled drugs, and the control book for them is a legal record that is checked, physically, against the bottles, at least once a year. A discrepancy between the two is a serious matter for the master personally.

So the controlled-drugs ledger here is append-only, requires a second signature, and cannot be reconciled by editing history. Everything else in the module — stock, expiry, treatments — is ordinary, and deliberately so.

• An append-only control book. Every withdrawal of a controlled drug is an entry that cannot be edited or deleted, with the quantity, the patient, the prescriber and a second signature.
• Stock with expiry, sorted by what runs out first. The chest screen leads with what expires soonest, because that is the only ordering that changes what anybody does today.
• Treatments recorded against the person. What was given, to whom, when, by whom and why — kept with the same access rules as everything else medical, which is to say tightly.
• The 12-month expert inspection. The inspection is a record with its findings, its date and its inspector, and the next one is computed from it.
• Reconciliation that shows a difference rather than hiding it. When the count does not match the book, the product records a discrepancy. It does not let the book be adjusted to match the shelf.
• Access that is genuinely restricted. Medical records are not visible to whoever has an officer role. The permission is separate and narrow, and the product checks it rather than a rank.

• The chest — stock, expiry, what runs out first
• Controlled drugs — the control book, append-only
• Treatments — what was given and to whom
• Checks — the expert inspection and its findings

Three registers in this product cannot be edited after the fact: the Oil Record Book, the controlled-drugs control book, and the rest-hour record chain. All three are places where the ability to edit is itself the risk, and in all three the product has no edit path at all rather than a permission nobody is given.

That distinction matters when somebody asks how it is enforced, because "we do not grant that permission" is a policy and "the code cannot express it" is a guarantee.