Pharmacist ‘didn’t know allergy jab was for a child’

A pharmacist who refused to dispense an EpiPen adrenalin injector without prescription to the mother of a teenager who later died from an allergic reaction told an inquest the “dynamic” would have been different if he had known it was for her daughter.

David Murphy told Dublin Coroner’s Court that when the mother of 14-year-old Emma Sloan came into Hamilton Long Pharmacy on O’Connell Street on December 18, 2013, to request the pen – an adrenalin shot which reverses the effects of anaphylactic shock – he was not told it was for her daughter, Emma.

“It would have changed the dynamic because I would have been able to ask different questions. I didn’t think I could verify a medical history if the person was a non-relative and if the person wasn’t there it was very difficult to make a clinical assessment,” he said.