Scenario:

A patient presents to your pharmacy with an insect bite and you start a consultation. Many guidance documents (see below for examples) suggest that one question we should ask is whether the patient is aware what they were bitten by or directly ask the question “were you bitten by a tick?”.

There are several issues with the way we ask questions about ticks. The most relevant being that the patient may not know what has bitten them or even what a tick is. It then falls to us as healthcare professionals to do some detective work to decide if a tick bite is a possibility. This module will give you the information required to consider that possibility if the patient does not know.

Examples of guidance documents showing tick questioning:

Important elements of history-taking for insect bites and stings from the Pharmaceutical Journal