Medication

Medication

Medication is an important aspect of care and one which needs attention.

Administering medicine is a high risk activity - particularly in home care, where environmental factors can be distracting.

Try to ensure you are focussed when administering medicine and avoid mistakes - double check every time!

It is very important that medicine is stored in an organised way - it should always be in the same place and kept as consistently as possible.

Old medicines - where they have not yet been returned to a pharmacy - should be clearly separated to avoid confusion.

If errors are made, it's very important to report them immediately - they do happen in spite of training and control measures, and it's much less likely that any real harm can be done if they are picked up on quickly!

Prompting & Assisting vs Administering

When you provide support with medication you will either be prompting & assisting or administering.

Prompting & assisting is known as 'Level 1' support under local policy.

The principle here is that the person understands their medication and can manage it, but needs some basic assistance or reminding to take it.

This might be because they lack the ability to fully remove it from packaging, for example.

'Level 2' support is administering, which means the carer is responsible for managing medication including choosing which medicine to give and when.

This is usually because the person lacks the mental capacity to manage their own medicine, but it can also be because of factors such as sight impairments.

The level of support required will be detailed in the care plan, but if specific medicines are to be recorded on your app the support should be Level 2.

It is important to remember that if you feel you are effectively choosing medicine for someone or physically supporting throughout, the support should be reviewed.

Analgesic Patches

Most of the medication you will encounter in home care will be in tablet form and administered orally, i.e. by mouth.

Some analgesic (for pain relief) medicine is administered using patches applied to the skin, however.

You might think that patches are less important than tablets, but you'd be wrong - patches can contain some very strong pain killers, some of which are controlled drugs.

Patches look a lot like an ordinary sticking plaster, and they are usually applied somewhere on the upper body like the back, chest or upper arms.

Where they are applied does not generally have any effect on how well they work - the main aim is to find a uniform area of skin free of hair.

It's always a good idea to change positions every time the patch is changed however, for example from the left of the body to the right.

Again it is not essential to return to exactly the same spot, but it is important to have some consistency so the patch will be somewhere obvious & expected to the next carer.

If the patch is usually on the back, don't move it to the chest - there is a risk that someone might miss it, or worse put a second patch on.

The idea of changing positions is to maintain skin integrity.

To be clear, you should always remove the old patch when you put a new one on.

The other important factor of patches for pain relief is that they are usually changed once per week or more, and always several days apart.

This is different to tablets which are usually daily, and it is easy to miss the change day.

Our policy with patches is to write the date of the patch change on the patch as a fail safe.

Patches should be checked frequently to ensure the changes are not missed.

The EMAR system on Careplanner will prompt you to apply a patch throughout the day if it is not marked as completed, but if for some reason it is missed for the whole day the window will close and the patch might remain on for another cycle - something we need to avoid!

MAR Chart Assessment

The MAR Chart Assessment below is used for us to understand your current knowledge of MAR charts.

The Norfolk Medication Policy for Home Care Services in full can be found below.