What is Medication Assistance?
As individuals become older, they become increasingly reliant on medicines, and unfortunately, the ageing process has an influence on people's capacity to manage their prescriptions. We wish to assist our clients in getting the most out of their aging process by improving their quality of life while avoiding the negative consequences of inappropriate, excessive, or inadequate pharmaceutical usage. Our number one aim is to help our clients in self-managing their medicines. As a result, our role may be limited to organising, picking up, or discarding medicines, as well as reminding clients to take their medications and assisting them with opening bottles and blister packs. However, as a care provider, we understand the challenges some individuals have when it comes to taking their medications, which is why we provide full support and assistance to those who need it.
How Can We Assist you in Taking Your Medicines?
When our care workers, caregivers, or care assistants are entrusted with assisting someone with their medications, they must adhere to a set of regulations to ensure they are performing their duties safely. Carers / Care workers / Care assistants must be trained and competent before they may take over responsibilities involving medicines. By completing extensive competency checks resulting in a ‘sign off’, we are ensuring that our carers are capable of assisting someone with their medications safely.
Our assistance will include:
- Adhering to the 6 Rights of medication
- Right to Decline
- Right Dose
- Right Medication
- Right Person
- Right Time
- Right Route
- Prompting our clients with all medications and creams where needed.
- With the client’s permission, contacting their pharmacist to arrange for the collection of their medications.
- Collecting medicines from the pharmacy
- Liaising with GPs to follow up or organise a medication review with consent
What Methods Do We Use to Manage Medicines?
- We train our carers, care assistants, and care workers and sign them off by testing their competency to manage medicines.
- We conduct an assessment to identify any risks associated with managing our clients medicines.
- We would agree on the level of our involvement with our clients and their family.
- We would enter our clients medications into Careberry, our electronic medication management system. Clients and families can access the system and will be able to see the medications.
- We will support you with other issues that may have a big impact on you if not dealt with properly. For example, following up with your social worker or other healthcare professionals. Or ensuring that your medicines are reviewed properly. We know from experience that sometimes these simple issues can cause substantial problems. Issues like untreated UTIs can cause a problem and discomfort.
- Our carers will have access to free PPE to use when required.
- Carers will have access to the E-MAR on Careberry to manage our clients medication needs and enter any changes.
- Careberry will notify us if our carers miss to give medicines or if they have been refused.
- We will retain a record for quality assurance and to provide our clients and Care Quality Commission (CQC) access for inspection as needed.
What would happen if we make an error?
- We'll notify the client and/or families right away and consult with your doctor, pharmacist, or our own designated pharmacist to see whether the issue can be corrected before a serious danger arises.
- Our caregiver will use Careberry to fill out an Incident Form. We'll review the Incident Form and decide what to do next, which might include extra training, changing the care plan, or making new arrangements in our clients home to prevent future mistakes.
- A safeguarding alert may be issued as a result of the incident if needed.
