Summary: Prescription Security Safe

* All medication should be recorded and signed for by the receiving pharmacist and a proper record maintained in-house.

Schedule 8 drugs are medications that are considered to contain substances that may produce addiction or dependence; they are available for use but require restrictions on possession and use to reduce abuse and misuse (Koutoukidis, Stainton, Hughson, 2013, p 436).The Drugs and Poisons Act specifies the storage requirements for controlled drugs that apply to providers (Drugs and Poisons Act 1996, p 115). This specification applies to patients/residents receiving high-level care and the patient or resident has been supplied S8 controlled medicines on a prescription or medication order. All medications in a residential facility or on a hospital ward are required to be kept in a locked cupboard. The Drugs and Poisons Act is very specific on the requirements such as; constructed of steel 10 millimetres thick; fitted

The Medication Policy and procedure and Mars Handbook covers assessment of individuals’ needs, administering, storage, recording and disposal of medicines including their effects and potential side effects

Medication must be stored in a secure locked cupboard or area as this is part of the role of a Support Practitioner. It is my duty to ensure that the risks to the health of others are properly controlled.

The storage of medicines is usually a matter for service users and their families however special procedures may need to be exercised in some cases to protect a vulnerable service user. Where it is inappropriate for the service user to have access this will identified in the care plan and medication must be kept in a safe place which is known and accessible to relative, care/support workers, health professionals and domiciliary care staff.

I also work closely with local pharmacies and doctors around the changing of a person’s medication. It’s important that we work closely together to ensure that the service user is having the correct medication at all times.

Goal 3: Safe Medication Identification. Unlabeled syringes and medications are your biggest threats. Labeling all medications at dispensing areas ensures better identification. Knowing what your patients are taking directly impacts their treatment plan. Medication reconciliation decreases the possibility of drug interactions.

Since the perception of patient safety has arisen, many medical organizations were striving to improve medication safety. Emory Healthcare, the largest and most comprehensive health care system in Georgia, was one of them who were seeking ways to prevent medication errors. In recent years, some

A physician could make mistakes in prescribing, the pharmacy could send the wrong medication, but who actually gave it to the patient is accountable for the consequences. For this reason, it’s our responsibility to implement change in our practice based on the evidence in order to ensure safe patient care.

A similar model has been described2, but its relationship with patient safety has not been robustly determined. This is a concern as junior doctors make the most prescribing errors3, and this model leaves potential for unsigned medications to be given. It would be unethical to introduce a model that undermined patient safety, therefore we made the prescriptions more visible and incorporated an audit cycle to ensure prescriptions were easily identifiable and met the required standard.

According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA 2009), the wrong route of administrating medication accounts for 1.3 million injuries each year. An article published in September issue of the Journal of Patient Safety estimates there are between 210,000 and 400,000 deaths per year associated with medical errors. This makes medical errors the third leading cause of deaths in the United States, behind that comes heart disease and cancer. To prevent medical errors always follow the Three Checks and most importantly the Rights of Medication Administration. The “Rights of Medication Administration” helps to ensure accuracy when administering medication to a patient. When administering medication the administer should ensure they have the Right Medication, Right Patient, Right Dosage, Right Route, Right Time, Right Route, Right Reason, and Right Documentation. Also remember the patient has the right to refuse, assess patient for pain, and always assess the patient for signs of effects.

Goal three by the National Patient Safety Goal for 2014 is to use medicines safely. Many errors occur regularly with medications which is why communication is so important with the doctors, nurses and patients. One process that Joint Commission requires in accredited HCO’s is medication reconciliation “creating the most accurate list possible off all medications a patient is taking, including drug name, dosage, frequency, and route, and comparing that list against the physician’s admission, transfer, and/or discharge orders with the goal of providing correct medications to the patients at all transition points within the hospital (Finkelman & Kenner, 2012, p. 388)”. Ensuring medication reconciliation to the patient, health providers and any new consults that are

There are other pharmacy staff who also have roles in relation to the safe dispensing of medicines. A pharmacist is responsible for: Overall checking of a prescription to make sure that it is legal and written by a person qualified to do so, dispensing the right quantity of the correct medicine, ensuring that medicines are correctly labelled with the person’s name, the name of the medicine and the dosage, providing advice and treatment for minor illnesses, injuries and health concerns, providing a repeat prescription service in co-operation with GP

Pharmaceutical companies’ ability to create consumers through production of a commodity is an impressive technique that capitalists habitually utilize to almost guarantee profit. Jody Emel and Harvey Neo argue that capitalism inherently relies on the process of commodification to ensure continual capital flow. They note that capitalism’s “unceasing concentration and intensification” to increase productivity and standardization through commodification allows the production of a new drug to presents itself as “natural” development. The term “intensification,” as Julie Guthman explains it, is “precisely the basis of increased…productivity” because it involves “improving the productivity of and/or value reaped from” a commodity (Emel, et al. 53).

They physician fills-out the prescription and should reiterate that the drug is safe for consumption.