This month saw the return of The Care Show to the NEC in Birmingham.
Golddust Marketing brought together a panel that are all involved in care home medication management to share their experiences and discuss best practice.
The CQC advocate that, “Good record keeping protects people receiving medicines support and their care workers.” The NICE guideline [NG67] states, “Social care providers should have robust processes for care workers who are supporting people to take their medicines, including the 6 (or some of you may know 10) rights (R’s) of administration.”
- Right resident
- Right medication
- Right route
- Right dose
- Right time
- Residents right to refuse
Despite the guidelines, concerningly medication management can go wrong and with all the extra pressures the sector has faced over the past few years it seems that best practice needs to be reviewed.
Research for the Department of Health shows that 7 out of 10 residents are exposed to at least one medication error per day. Mistakes are made by people across the process from the GP to the pharmacist and care home staff.
In the care home, incidents commonly occur where:
- The resident is accidentally given the wrong medication.
- The resident is given too much or too little of their own medication.
- The resident is given it at the wrong time.
- The care professional fails to identify drug interactions or contraindications.
Medication management is one of the most important aspects of adult social care, as if an error occurs it can have fatal implications. Care homes ultimately need to adopt a person-centred approach to medication practice that manages, mitigates, and minimises error.
The forum was well-attended and raised some very valid, and thought-provoking points of view and discussion on improving the prescribing, dispensing and management of medication in care homes.
What are your experiences with medication management in the social care sector?
The key takeaways for Golddust Marketing over all from the Care Show were:-
- Take admin away to HQ and enable carers to care
- Activities are essential not optional
- Befriending and Volunteers can add extra support – this is not a sign of failing
- Everyone makes mistakes – let’s not persecute – let’s learn and develop
- Sustainably in care needs to be addressed – small steps make big changes
- Let’s go into schools and make care fashionable – community partnerships
On another note – if you’d like to receive a copy of the 360 Social Care Debate White Paper which was launch in May this year, please follow this link and we’ll get it to you ASAP.