Episode 12 — Out of medicine on a Sunday: how not to panic

Sunday, half past seven in the evening.

My mum rings.

She's down to her last tablet of the medicine she takes every day.

The prescription one.

The chemists on the corners shut.

The next one open?

No idea.

And this is the moment, I think.

How has this happened again?

We only bought that pack.

Well, I can't remember when.

Hello.

I'm Tomáš Šuster.

I built the Moja Ptečka app.

And what Iza's just described is a scenario every household knows.

A medicine runs out on a Sunday.

Always on a Sunday.

Never a Tuesday at 11 in the morning when three chemists are open and I've got time.

Because on a Tuesday you'd just go and buy it.

See, the problem isn't that the chemists is shut.

The problem is you find out the pack's empty at the worst possible moment.

On the last tablet.

All right.

But how am I meant to know sooner?

Am I to tip the blister packs out on the table every evening and count?

You don't have to count.

The app does it for you.

Every time you mark that someone's taken a dose, the pack count drops by one.

The app knows how many are left the whole time.

Hang on.

So it updates the number when I tick off a dose?

Yes.

It doesn't scan anything in the background.

It just counts from what you tick off.

And here's the heart of it.

For each medicine, you can set a threshold.

Say, warn me when there are five tablets left.

When the count drops to that threshold, you get a notification.

It's called exactly what the problem is.

Low stock.

And what's in that notification?

The name of the medicine and how many are left.

In black and white, five left, threshold five.

And you don't get it on the last tablet on a Sunday.

You get it a few days earlier, when you can still pop to the chemists, calmly, on a Wednesday afternoon.

So you bring that moment of panic forward a few days.

From there's nothing left to five left.

Buy some while you're out.

Exactly.

And if you can't be bothered setting a threshold by hand for every medicine, there's a default one.

It works straight away.

Nothing to configure.

Right.

But I've got about 30 different things at home.

Mum's medicine, the children's medicines, paracetamol, vitamin D.

I'm not clicking thresholds for each one separately.

And you don't have to.

That's why there's a second thing.

A shopping list.

In the app, it's just called that.

A shopping list.

Under the basket icon in My Medicines.

A basket, like in a shop?

A bit like that.

Except it fills itself.

Anything that's low or has just gone out of date lands on that list automatically.

You don't build it.

It builds itself, from what the app already knows about your cabinet.

And if I want to add something I haven't even got yet, because if I'm going to the chemists, I'll pick up some vitamin C while I'm at it.

You add it by hand from two places.

Either from the My Medicines list.

From a medicines menu.

From a medicines menu.

Add to basket.

Or, and this matters, from the register of all medicines.

In the app, there's a separate All Medicines tab.

The whole register.

Tens of thousands of products.

You find the vitamin C you haven't got at home, and you drop it onto the same list.

So, one list.

So, one list.

Both what's running out, and what I want to buy.

One list for one trip to the chemists.

Because nobody carries five lists.

One for the kitchen cupboard.

One for the bathroom.

You carry one.

And what do I do with it then?

You can send it.

You share it like any ordinary bit of text.

To your husband.

Your mum.

Whoever happens to be nearer chemists.

Here.

This is the list.

Get this.

No copying it onto a scrap of paper that ends up in your pocket anyway.

And just by the by, everything we're talking about here is a real feature of the Moya Potechka app.

This isn't an advert.

Just context, to be clear.

All right.

But let's go back to mum on that Sunday.

Because all these lists and thresholds are lovely when you're on top of it in advance.

And sometimes you just don't manage it in time.

It's Sunday.

The medicine's gone now.

What then?

Then it's the last resort.

And I'll be straight with you.

That's the bit no app fixes.

Out of hours pharmacy cover is thin.

And finding one open on a Sunday evening isn't a given.

And I'll be honest.

I don't much trust the opening hours you look up online.

Because you're usually pointed to one that should be open.

And you're standing outside a dark window.

And you're right that that's a problem.

Sunday and late evening opening is patchy.

And which pharmacies actually open keeps changing.

There's no tidy, reliable list you can lean on.

So you can't even count on finding one open?

Not reliably, no.

The honest way to check is to ring 111, the non-emergency line.

And they'll point you to a pharmacy that's open.

But I won't pretend the app has a magic map that always finds you somewhere open at three in the morning.

The app doesn't do the pharmacy scramble.

Everything else, the threshold, the notification, the shopping list, is there so you don't have to do that scramble at all.

Right, that does sound honest.

The app doesn't pretend it's better than it is.

Because if it did, you'd lose trust in it at the first dark window.

The pharmacy hunt is plan B.

All the rest is there so you never reach for plan B.

And when we're at my parents' allotment and there's no signal...

The list and the counts are saved on the phone, so they work without a network.

So a healthy medicine cabinet is one where Sunday's boring.

The best compliment this app could get.

That it makes Sunday boring.

You know what strikes me most in all this?

That it isn't about medicines.

It's about not ringing your mum on a Sunday to ask,

how many have you got left?

Because she'll say, there's probably some anyway.

And probably some isn't a number you can rely on.

The app turns probably some into an actual number.

Five left.

What you do with that is your decision.

And that's it.

No panic.

No panic.

If you'd like to give it a go, that's the Moya Pteczka app.

The app is free and works offline.

You'll find the link in the episode description.

And, if you enjoyed the episode,

share it with someone who knows that Sunday phone call.

I've run out of my medicine.

One more thing before we go.

This podcast is made with the help of artificial intelligence.

I wrote the dialogue myself,

but the voices you're hearing aren't ours.

They're AI-generated synthetic voices.

We're telling you this straight out,

because we think it should be the standard for any podcast made this way.

Full details are in the show notes,

and in every episode description.

Until next time.

Until next time.