Medication Management Tips

Today, Nicola is here to give you some tips on Medication Management. Learn what to do, what not do and some handy things to remember when completing your rounds.

Topics Covered In This Article

Introduction

Remember To Think Critically

Understand What You Are Administering

Always Look To Improve

Report Any Mistakes

Get Involved

Introduction

Hi guys, my name is Nicola, and I'm a Neonatal Sister.

Today I'm going to be talking to you about medicine management and giving you some tips and advice that will help you make your medicine management skills and competencies a lot easier.

Remember To Think Critically

During rounds, when your patient's drug chart is being discussed, if there are changes being made, get yourself involved in the conversation, get into the habit of having some critical thinking as part of your everyday Nursing life.

It's really important that you have a rationale for everything that you do in practice.

And so, if a Doctor says to you they want you to administer this medication, they want you to stop this medication, ask them why, ask them, why am I given this medication?

Why have we stopped this medication?

What is the reasoning for this?

This will really help to improve your knowledge and your understanding of what you are doing within your role.

Understand What You Are Administering

So have a general understanding of the drug you are giving and why, because patients and their family members will want to know what drug you are giving them and why.

And it's not a good look, if you're about to give a medication to somebody, they ask you, "what is this? "What is it for?"

And you say, I don't know.

Even if it's a medication that you are not used to giving, check the BNF, why am I giving this medication?

What is it for?

How frequently do I need to give it?

Are there any side effects?

Because, all of these things are part of your basic Nurse and care.

As much as we love using a calculator, it's really important not to be too reliant on it.

The calculator is only as good as the person that has inputted the information in the first place.

And in some trusts, they do frown upon the use of a calculator.

Always Look To Improve

So, what I would advise you to do is to really improve your skills, enhance your skills with guesstimating.

So that simply means to approximately work out the answer, have a rough understanding of how much you think you're going to be ministering.

And then crosscheck that with your calculator.

You don't have to work everything out the same way as everybody else.

And that is why we do independent checking.

As long as you are getting the right answer, find a formula and a method that works for you.

You don't need to know everything from memory, utilize the resources around you.

Trust protocols, guidelines, the BNF.

You can print out common formulas and keep them to hand in your pocket, in a notebook, on a lanyard, if your trust allows that.

Make life easy for yourself.

At some point in your career, it is likely that no matter how hard you try, you will make some form of drug error.

The reason being that, regardless of how thorough, how careful you are, we are human and mistakes unfortunately do happen.

Report Any Mistakes

And all we can always hope is that the type of error that occurs is something that will be small, and something that does not put the patient at great harm.

So what I always say to people is that should a drug error occur, make sure you escalate it, make sure you report it.

The patient's safety is the most important thing.

It’s really, really important that if there has been a drug error, you report it.

The other reason why we say to escalate and report any drug errors that happen is because we want to prevent these things from happening again.

We want to understand, why did that drug error happen?

And what can we do to stop it from happening again?

It's not about the blame game.

And what I always say to people is to not get yourselves involved with workplace gossip about mistakes and errors that people have made because we are all human, mistakes do happen, and you yourself could be on the end of making a drug error.

And you wouldn't want people to be gossiping about your mistake either.

There is nothing wrong with saying I'm not familiar with this drug, I don't feel confident working out this medication with you.

You are well within your rights to decline checking a medication if it is not within your scope of practice, if it's something that you don't feel comfortable with.

And what I always advise people is that if that is the case, and there is a medication that you don't feel comfortable checking, watch your colleagues work it out, watch them make up the medication, watch how they work it out so that the next time you're in that situation, you will know what to do.

But there is nothing wrong with saying, I don't feel comfortable checking with this medication.

I'm not 100% sure, it's been a while since I've worked it out.

And it doesn't matter how experienced you are, you can say this.

Get Involved

If medicine management intimidates you, don't shy away from it.

Get yourself involved with the drug rounds, lead the drug rounds, draw up medications, administer them where it's appropriate.

All these things, the practice, the working out medications, drawing them up.

All of these things will help to improve your knowledge, your skills, your understanding, and make you feel a lot more comfortable and confident within your medicine management.

So I hope you found that useful, thank you so much for watching.