To ensure that the medications are administered safely and accurately in your care home, you have to consider different ways to help your staff. A well-trained team that has more time for person-centered care can improve patient safety and health outcomes. Let’s discuss more over here:
1) Consider the work environment: Medication errors and other safety issues can happen due to certain work conditions which include increased workload, staff shortage, poorly designed medication administration guidelines, staff distractions and failure by the care team to adhere to the policies. As a manager, you have to assess these factors regularly and implement changes as and when required.
2) Implement eMAR to streamline the medication administration process – eMAR medication system offers a host of benefits including improving medication safety, saving medication administration time and improving operational efficiency of the care home. To book an eMAR demo, get in touch with us. It will take 30 minutes for our team to show you the benefits of going paperless. We can do demos remotely at a time that suits you. Training and set up can also be done remotely for you.
3) Staff training: Provide education and training to your caregiving team on following the best practices for medication management. Some of the best practices include: being extra careful while dealing with medications with similar appearances or names, following the 5 Rs of medication administration and making a record of the administration as soon as possible.
4) Ensuring that there are fewer distractions while the staff is administering medicines: One of the causes of medication errors in care homes is the work interruptions experienced by the staff. Some of the strategies that care homes have applied to reduce distractions include care staff wearing “do not disturb” tabards while administering medicine or preparing the medicine, creating an isolated drug preparation area and allocating staff to work on urgent non-medical work so that the care team on the medication round is not disturbed.
Implementing useful technologies like eMAR has many benefits
First of all, with eMAR you can make your medication administration process a paperless one. You and your team won’t have to manually check every MAR sheet every day or after everytime your staff ends his/her medication round. The digital nature of the system helps you get a complete picture of the activities in real time for efficiency. To know more about the electronic medication administration record template, watch the video. Data is always backed-up in a secured manner.
