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Is medication management at your nursing home draining precious resources? If you're looking for ways to reduce staff costs and save time, take a look at these three smart med management tips.
Contract With a Compounding Pharmacy
Many elderly people have a complex combination of medical needs, so managing all the pills, liquids and drops that one resident needs can be difficult enough. When you have to administer multiple medicines to multiple residents multiple times a day, the difficulty multiplies exponentially. That's why one of the best and smartest ways to make med management easier in your nursing home is to reduce the number of different drugs that each resident needs to take. You can do this by contracting with compounding services. Compounding pharmacists are able to reduce daily medicine intake by combining different drugs into one format as well as creating more accurate doses so medicines don't need to be taken as often. On top of that, they can also make medication administration easier by producing drugs in formats that residents find easier to take, such as chewable pills, lozenges or creams.
Use Medication Management Technology
Your aging residents may not be computer-savvy, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be. If you're currently handling all the background work of your medication management operation (such as records, scheduling and pharmacy communications) manually, employing the use of specialist nursing home software could save you a lot of time and stress. Medication management technology can automatically schedule medication times based on residents' needs, accurately predict when medicines are running low and automatically message the pharmacy for a prescription, generate reports, issue alerts and much more. Not only will this reduce the amount of time your staff spends managing medicines, it will also increase medication safety by eliminating human errors, highlighting missed or late doses, ensuring you never run out of a resident's pills and keeping track of PRN (pro re nata) medications.
Help Residents Manage Their Own Health
It may seem obvious, but allowing and helping residents to manage their own medications is one of the best ways to reduce strain on your staff. If residents are competent and aware, there's no reason they shouldn't be given the opportunity to take medications themselves without intervention from your home. In fact, it can help boost morale and help aging residents regain a much-needed feeling of independence. When conducting a risk assessment to decide which residents can manage their own medication, take into account whether they are able to take the right dose at the right time in the right way, whether self-administrating poses a risk to the resident or other residents and staff, and whether they want to manage their own meds. The more residents you have handling their own health, the less hectic administration will be for everyone else.
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