Thursday, October 18, 2012

Tudor House Upgrades Medication Distribution

Tudor House Personal Care Home in Selkirk is the first personal care home in the Interlake to have multi-dose packaging, which means less medication errors.

The Home’s administrator Ashley Martyniw explained outside of Winnipeg facilities disperse medication by blister packs. Essentially that means each resident has one blister pack for each medication for the entire month, which can get complicated when residents are on multiple medications.

“If you have five or six medications you have five or six cards,” explained Martyniw. “So what happens when you have a facility like us where we have 76 residents, each resident has a card for every pill they have for every medication path – for breakfast, lunch, super, bedtime – so you have racks and racks and racks of these pills.”

Tudor House will never have to deal with those cards again as they implemented Pac Med Sept. 25. Martyniw said the Home has been trying to implement this system, which is used within the City of Winnipeg, for years but it was never practical until now. Pac Med packages all of a resident’s medications into a pouch for that particular point in the day. Martyniw said the system improves

Tudor House in a number of ways; the multi-dose packages save the nursing staff time that allows them intern to spend more time with residents; and it helps to reduce medication errors. “Medication errors are a common thing that happens in health care and this makes it very much less likely that it could happen because you’re not dealing with lots of different cards,” said Martyniw.

“The biggest difference is that it will speed up the time required to give out medication so that the nurses will have more free time to spend with the residents – they won’t be spending a long period of time doing medications three, four times a day.” Martyniw also explained the Pac Med system, which is provided to Tudor House by Rexall Geri-Aid Pharmacy, is of no extra cost either and will be paid for by the funding they receive through the Interlake-Eastern Regional Health Authority and Manitoba Health.

Also, after Pac Med is implemented and ‘running smoothly’ Martyniw said he plans to work towards getting Tudor House a full-computerized medication system. “Right now everybody has a medication book where they sign off physically for each medication, but in lots of facilities across Canada they don’t even use that anymore they’ve gone to a laptop computer on the medication cart,” explained Martyniw. “They scan the medications and it’s all administered by computer, for record keeping. That’s the next step to go for us in the next few years.”

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