Missouri Poison Center

Visual: Missouri Poison Center logo appears on a gray background.

Sound: Gentle, melancholic instrumental music begins.

Visual: Person 1, a woman with short curly hair wearing a beige leather jacket and a pendant necklace, stands in an office in front of a “Missouri Poison Center” sign.

Person 1: I think the best part about working for the center is actually working on the hotline. I really enjoy being director and working with all the nurses and pharmacists here but on the hotline you actually get to hear the relief in a parent’s voice or how you’ve helped an adult with the medication mistake and just hearing their thanks and just that calmness that you’ve really solved a problem right there for them is just very rewarding.

Visual: Person 2, a woman with short blonde hair wearing a black jacket and a patterned top with a long necklace, sits in an office cubicle.

Person 2: A lot of times you’ll be at a group or you’ll be with a group of parents and you’ll teach them something that they didn’t know or something that they thought was safe that was in their house and they realize that maybe that wasn’t how it should be done and just so that new knowledge is really rewarding just teaching people you know what to do for poison safety.

Visual: Person 3, a woman with long gray hair and a light-colored blazer with a cross necklace, sits in an office.

Person 3: CSPI is our certification that we get it’s a pretty rigorous amount of information that we study in order to pass this test which is also very intense. We cover the various subjects in toxicology such as drugs and biologicals, snake bites, bug bites, spider bites, chemicals, cleaning stuff you know very the different areas that we encounter in our calls in our work every day.

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Person 2: The Poison Center can give you an answer in just seconds. I mean you can search Google for minutes and even hours at a time and not find the right answer so the value I think is just speaking to somebody who’s an expert learning about what to do specifically for yourself or your child and then having somebody who’s an expert to follow up with you on the telephone.

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Person 1: We have pharmacists and nurses who work in the Poison Center and I love the different backgrounds that they come from. We maybe have a nurse that comes from an ICU or emergency department background or a pharmacist who comes from research or hospitals just a variety of backgrounds but the two different educational backgrounds are pharmacists and nurses.

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Person 3: The attitude is that we do good things, you know, help people at home, help provide support for medical staff whether we’re talking to the emergency rooms or EMS and it’s kind of we want to jump in and help and benefit, you know, the staff by, you know, keeping people at home when they don’t need to go to the emergency room, helping them at home, it’s just a big helping environment and very supportive in general.

Visual: Back with Person 1.

Person 1: The real value at the Poison Center is that we’re able to save time where someone doesn’t have to wait in the emergency department and costs. We really stop that unnecessary trip and cost to the families and people for their emergency department visit. It’s not a simple algorithm we can follow and go down, but it takes a lot of input and output. So a lot coming from the caller and then our team really works to decipher that question, work down calculations, know the different pharmacology behind that substance and then we give our best formulated answer to treat a patient safely at home.

Visual: A red horizontal bar appears. It transitions to a blue bar with text: “Call 1-800-222-1222”. It then transitions to a circular graphic with red and blue arcs. Finally, the Missouri Poison Center logo with the phone number appears on a gray background.