Administration in Care Homes
Many authorised care home staff can quickly, safely and securely order their resident’s medications online. This saves the care home, pharmacy and GP practice staff time. It also makes the dispensing of individual medicines easier and creates an automatic audit trail.
To help, the Local Government Association and NHS have published a step-by-step guide. It takes care homes through setting up and granting authorised care home staff proxy access to their resident’s GP online services account.
‘Optimising Medicines Support for Patients – Seven Day Prescribing & Multi-compartment Compliance Aids (MCA) Best Practice’ guidance
MCAs are also known as blister packs or dossette boxes.
Local guidance has been developed by Hertfordshire and West Essex Integrated Care Board to support patients, carers, and healthcare professionals to optimise medication management. An accompanying patient information leaflet is also available for patient use. The guidance states that ‘MCAs (commonly known as dosette boxes or blister packs) are only suitable for people who manage their own medicines, and where these have been agreed as the most suitable option by a community pharmacist which can sometimes be chargeable. An MCA is not suitable for the majority of patients for safety reasons.
Where an alternative sector considers an MCA may be suitable, a joint decision discussion is had and agreed with the usual community pharmacist. It is ultimately the community pharmacist’s decision as to whether they supply a patient’s medicines in an MCA’. The guidance applies to new patients that require medicines support aid and existing patients (opportunistically conducting a case-by-case review to determine if an MCA is the most appropriate medicines support aid). The guidance recognises. Read more here.
Click here for ‘Guidance for Optimising Medicines Support for Patients’.
Medication Administration Record (MAR)
Effective record keeping helps ensure that citizens and individuals are always receiving the best possible care and allows for mistakes and concerns to be addressed quickly. Medication Administration Records (MAR) are vital to ensuring staff understand patient’s medical needs and are able to administer the correct medications safely.
Paper based or electronic medicines administration records should:
- Be legible
- Be signed by the care home staff or care workers
- Be clear and accurate
- Have the correct date and time (either the exact time or the time of day the medicine was taken)
- Be completed as soon as possible after the person has taken the medicine
- Avoid jargon and abbreviations
CQC what good looks like for digital records in adult social care
CQC Guidance about MARs