Camascope's Clinical Safety Officer, Mandeep Khaira, knows a thing or two about medicine management. He previously worked as a superintendent pharmacist prior to joining Camascope. In this article, he shares some tips on managing complex and changing medicine doses in a care home.
We've all been there. The instructions are clear, week 6 of prednisolone dose is 2 tablets every morning. But we've just started a new cycle and so I've got to go back and find the old MARs (medication administration records) and do some calculations. Is it really week 6? Could it be week 5? Can I assume whoever gave it yesterday got it right and just follow them or should I calculate what week we're on every day?
Prednisolone isn't the only drug that can change dose depending on the day or week and it's a frustration faced daily across a variety of care scenarios.
It's hard enough tracking medication for 30 residents on a consistent dose, so it's easy to see how changing, complex medicine doses can cause frustration, time wasted and most crucially lead to medicine administration errors.
There are of course ways to improve this. Comprehensive notes and additional details in instructions can help to reduce medicine errors, but the problem is that resident care is incredibly complex. You can't just give an order and expect it to be followed. You have to account for the fact that some staff will be more diligent than others and that some residents needs can be more complex.
Trying to track and calculate doses, whilst juggling everything going on in the care home is a big ask. Auditing and managing these actions can be an even bigger task.
It doesn't help that rushed MAR chart signatures and notes are difficult to comprehend at the best of times. It's simply not acceptable to risk giving someone the incorrect amount of medication, so it's important to do things the correct way every time, even if it takes considerably longer.
This is where Electronic MARs (eMAR) can truly shine. eMARs are, of course, paperless. A thoughtfully designed EMAR can be used to track changing doses, dose history and accuracy. It also helps with the management of medication errors by allowing staff to see if residents have received their prescription correctly. Staff are also alerted to any potential issues with dosage or administration.
Camascope's eMAR system has intelligent scheduling technology which schedules all complex medicine doses from cycle to cycle, without manual intervention, saving time and reducing errors.
As an example, patches than are applied once every 72 hours, can be scheduled once until the course is changed or stopped. Even injections that are scheduled for every 6 months to one year and are not part of a regular 28-day cycle, will be automatically scheduled on the system.
The Camascope's solution allows for a different schedule to be configured for each day, and can even cater for medicines such as dexamethasone that are scaled up and down, showing exactly what needs to be given at the point of administration.
The role as a care provider is not only to provide residents with the best possible living conditions but also to help them live well and stay healthy. An important element of that is proper medication management. Ensuring that the right dose is given every time and without complication and time wasted will lead to happier staff, improved CQC ratings, and healthier residents.
If you’d like to know how Camascope's new eMAR solution can work for your organisation, contact us to find out more.
