How Long-Term Care Pharmacies Enhance Medication Safety
Medication errors in long-term care facilities can have severe consequences, making medication safety a top priority. Partnering with a long-term care pharmacy enhances safety through compliance packaging, which simplifies dosing and minimizes mistakes, and through expert organization of medications to prevent mix-ups. Consulting pharmacists provide staff education on proper medication administration and conduct thorough medication reviews to catch potential drug interactions. These services help facilities reduce errors and improve overall patient care.
Studies have found varying numbers for the incidence of medication errors in skilled nursing facilities, ranging from 16% to 27% of surveyed residents being subject to at least one medication error.
In many cases, the medication error has no impact or significant impact, but in far too many cases, a simple medication error leads to severe outcomes, including death.
All medical professionals who administer medication to patients are trained on the Seven Rights of Medication Administration: the right person, the right medication, the right dose, the right time, the right route, the right reason, and the right documentation. But even well-trained professionals are capable of making a mistake.
When your skilled nursing facility or other long-term care facility partners with a long-term care pharmacy, such as Angus Lake Healthcare, your consulting pharmacist can provide you with some solutions that reduce the likelihood of a medication error and improve your entire facility’s medication safety.
A Long-Term Care Pharmacy Can Provide Compliance Packaging
While there’s no 100% foolproof way to ensure that your facility’s medication program is error-free, compliance packaging is probably the closest thing to providing foolproof pill administration.
With compliance packaging, each patient’s medication is delivered in ready-to-dispense dose packs that combine every pill the patient takes, broken down into administration times. So, if a patient has pills they take in the morning, afternoon, and at bedtime, they’ll have three dose packs a day, each one containing the patient’s pills for that specific time of day.
The dose packs primarily come in two forms:
- Blister packs, with each dose pack contained within a separate “blister.”
- Pill packs, or rolls of small poly bags, each containing one dose pack.
When your staff administers a patient’s compliance-packed medication, they only need to confirm the patient’s identity and the correct dose pack for the time of day. There’s no dipping into individual bottles, counting out tablets, or worrying about something being missed.
A Long-Term Care Pharmacy Can Help You Organize Your Medications
While compliance packaging can streamline and dramatically reduce medication errors for pills, there’s no real equivalent for injection-route medications, oral-route liquids, and several other forms of medication that need to be delivered via some means other than a pill.
These medications are where a high percentage of medication errors occur. The vials for injected medications tend to be small, hard to read, and very similar in appearance. Oral-route liquids, too, tend to look very much alike in both packaging and labeling. Compounding the issue is the matter of sound-alike drugs – some of which are dramatically different in function and potency (for example, mistakenly administering OxyContin instead of oxycodone could quickly lead to a dangerous overdose, respiratory arrest, or death).
When you partner with a consulting long-term care pharmacy, your pharmacy team will be able to help you organize your pharmacy and medication carts to:
- Ensure that sound-alike and look-alike medications are never stored adjacent to one another
- Make sure that your facility’s sound-alike and look-alike charts and shelf labels are accurate and up-to-date
- Help you implement a general system to keep medications well-organized from the pharmacy to the bedside
A Long-Term Care Pharmacy Can Provide Education
The absolute, hands-down best defense against medication errors is a well-trained staff. While the professionals who serve your residents are already well-trained on many aspects of health care, continuing education is always a good call, especially for something as sensitive and potentially dangerous as medication.
Your consulting long-term care pharmacy should be able to offer your staff training that improves overall patient care, focused on medication administration. Pharmacists are the healthcare system’s medication experts, and a consulting pharmacist and their team can provide sessions that give insight on medication packaging, storage, and administration, as well as best practices for disposing of unneeded or expired medication.
A Long-Term Care Pharmacy Can Offer Medication Reviews
The last tool in your toolkit for preventing medication errors is a detailed medication review of each patient’s prescriptions. All too often, residents who are receiving care from multiple physicians are prescribed drugs that have dangerous interactions or cancel one another out just due to provider oversight.
While an error in prescribing a medication isn’t your staff’s responsibility, your team will be responsible for managing the situation if a prescription conflict leads to a complication. As your partner in medication safety, your consulting long-term care pharmacy can provide you with medication review services.
In a medication review, a pharmacist reviews a patient’s charts and prescriptions with the following questions in mind:
- Do any of these medications have potentially dangerous interactions?
- Do any of these medications work at cross purposes or cancel one another out?
- Does the patient have the conditions these medications treat?
- Are there any alternative medications that might serve this patient better?
- Does the dosage of each medication make sense for the patient?
If there are any concerns about a resident’s medication, your consulting pharmacist will work with the resident’s physicians to resolve the issues and reduce the risk of an interaction, overdose, or other significant adverse impacts.
Want to Reduce the Risk of a Dangerous Medication Error? Partner With Angus Lake Healthcare Today!
Our pharmacists and pharmacy technicians provide the pharmaceutical services you need to ensure accurate medication administration. From filling prescriptions to ensuring compliance packaging, patient education, medication inspections, reviews, vaccinations, and prescription deliveries, we take care of your pharmaceutical needs so you can focus on your residents’ health.
To learn more about medication reviews, inspections, and training, schedule a consultation with Angus Lake Healthcare today: 478-233-1828.
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