Calculating how many tablets are needed for a prescription

Speaker 1: Hello mate, you need me?

Speaker 2: Yes Anthony. I've got this prescription from a doctor, for a patient who's on a reducing dose of steroids.

I'd like you to do this for me if that's OK?

Speaker 1: Yeah of course.

Speaker 2: What I need you to do, is to work out the number of tablets for each stage of the course, and the total number of tablets at the end that we need to supply to this patient.

Speaker 1: Yeah that's fine.

Speaker 2: It's really, really important that we get this exactly right, and I'll be checking it at the end once you've done it.

Speaker 1: I'll be super careful yeah?

Speaker 2: OK.

Speaker 1: (TO AUDIENCE) This patient is on steroids, but when they leave the hospital they're going to have to come off them slowly.

I must work out how many tablets are needed, and then I can supply the right amount of packets from the dispensary.

Speaker: A patient needs a reducing course of steroids, when he leaves the hospital.

I've got to work out how many tablets he should take for each stage of the reduction and how many total he needs to go home with.

So, the prescription tells me how much of the steroid he should have each day, for each week of the course.

OK, the tablets come in 5 milligrams (mg).

So the first thing I must do, is work out how many to give him, for each stage of the reduction.

In the first week, he needs 40mg, every day.

So I need to divide 40mg by 5 as that's the strength of each tablet.

So that comes to 8.8 tablets per day in week 1.

OK, now we have how many tablets he should take, per day, each week.

Now I need to add up the totals.

That equals… 36 tablets. Hmm, that doesn't seem like enough.

Oh, I've only worked out the number of tablets needed for each day, at each dosage.

Not to worry. I can just times the total figure I've got now by 7, and that will give me the figure I need…

252 tablets. But how many packets of tablets is that?

252 tablets, divided by the 28 tablets in a pack.

OK, great got it, so he needs to take home 9 packets.

Speaker 1: Hey Anthony. How did you get on with the steroid prescription?

Speaker 2: Erm I think I did OK.

Speaker 1: If you could just run through it with me?

Speaker 2: Well… first of all I started working out how much tablets they would need per day, for each week.

I then looked back at his prescription to check the amount of milligrams he'd need per day.

I divided that by 5, to give me the amount of tablets he would need.

Then added up all the totals for each week and that gave me 36.

Speaker 1: People sometimes completely forget to multiply it by 7 to get the weekly total rather than a daily total.

Speaker 2: Yeah I nearly did that myself.

Speaker 1: Yeah, well that's a common mistake, that is.

Speaker 2: I realised, so I made sure I multiplied my 36 by 7.

That gave me 252 tablets. Then I checked the packs. They were packs of 28, so I divided the 252 by 28 and that gave me 9 packets.

Speaker 1: Great stuff Anthony. Well done.

Speaker 2: Thank you.