Heartbeat: Medicine administration – supporting safe and effective care

June 15, 2020

Medicine administration – the art of giving the right dosage of the right medication to the right patient at the right time. While this sounds like its fraught with danger, it’s actually quite a safe process – if you follow the approved workflow.

One of the key features of Unity is clinical safety, and in no other role is this most evident than it is in medicine administration. With the operational pressures of busy wards, the constant demands on nursing staff, a safe process to administer medication was one of the first elements established in Unity.

A simple scan of a barcode on a patient’s wristband is all that is needed to pull up a list of medication to administer, followed by scanning the barcode on the medication before it is administered. This means there are two automated system checks to make sure that mistakes don’t happen.

To find out more about the duty of care when dispensing drugs, Heartbeat caught up with Chief Pharmacist, Puneet Sharma. He said, “Barcode scanning of patients’ wristbands and medication is mandatory for all staff when administering medication. Bypassing the scan to save time puts lives at risk and could prove fatal.

“Occasionally it is necessary to bypass a scan, whether it’s a faulty scanner or an unreadable wristband, however these should be few and far between. And in these few cases, the bypass must be documented.”

Following feedback from our nursing colleagues, changes have been made to the medication administration wizard in Unity about how not being able to barcode scan a patient’s wristband, or not barcode scanning the medication is now recorded. With the new drop-down recording, we can track which particular medication has not scanned (and if there is a barcode issue resolve this quickly), or if the medication has not scanned for a valid reason. This is then recorded against individual Unity logins, so ward managers can see if there are particular members of the team that need further support through reports.

Should you have any queries or difficulties using barcode scanning, please speak to the Unity Super User in the first instance. If further information is needed, please email the EPMA team via swbh.PharmEPMABuild@nhs.net.