Even small clinics rely on dozens of different pieces of furniture and equipment to get through the day, and large hospitals require hundreds. One frequently overlooked tool is the medication cart, which nurses use while making their rounds or physicians use during procedures.
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Medication carts come in a few main types, with additional features that vary widely based on hospitals or other medical facilities' needs. However, the best option for your nursing unit may be different than the type that works for the rest of the facility.
If your unit regularly has narcotics, you'll need a secure cart to prevent theft and abuse. However, other non-hazardous medications should also be kept as secure as possible to enhance patient safety and prevent errors.
Lite computing workstations or charting carts are useful in keeping medical records organized or for medical documentation that does not require secure storage.
Traditionally, hospital medication carts were locked with keys or punch cards. This simple system makes it easy to hand off access to other staff members and doesn't rely on a power source.
However, manual locks are not very secure, especially if keys or punch cards are lost or stolen. They also do not necessarily have built-in mechanisms for preventing medication errors, which can jeopardize patient lives.
If you decide to use manual locking carts, make sure to take additional precautions. Like other medication carts manually locking carts, often called unit dose medication carts are safest when filled with individual unit doses. You will also want to avoid putting high-value medications, such as opiates, inside the carts.
Instead of using a metal key, many nursing medication carts unlock with an electronic tag or keycard. This technology can even be built into individual staff name tags or ID cards, giving each member of your team a unique code for accessing medications.
Keycard or ID card medication carts are more secure because they can prohibit staff from accessing medications outside of their shift or accessing drugs they aren't authorized to dispense. They are a highly flexible type of cart with potential applications everywhere, from oncology units to small family practice clinics.
Narcotics boxes often use 4-6 digit passcodes that are assigned to individual users. Advanced narcotics boxes have memory chips or USB ports that allow administrators to download long-term access data, creating an audit trail in case of theft or abuse. These password systems are often enough to deter theft by both patients and staff making secure electronic medication storage beneficial to facilities.
This technology can also be extended to other general-use drawers on hospital medication carts. Password systems can be computerized, but some just use a small electronic keypad. Whichever you decide, you will still need to take additional precautions to prevent staff from administering the wrong medication.
Preventing medication errors requires careful confirmation of which patients are supposed to receive a particular dose. Mobile medication storage carts can be equipped with barcode scanner technology that requires medical professionals to scan the barcode tag assigned to a patient before proceeding with dispensing medication. Barcode locking can also be used in conjunction with passwords or keycards as needed for enhanced security.
This method only unlocks the drawers containing a patient's medication once the appropriate patient's barcode is scanned, for more enhanced medical cart efficiency regarding security. Pharmacy and nursing staff must take care when loading the cart with necessary pill cards and vials, but once it's out on the ward floor, this method utilizes electronic locking storage accurately and leaves less room for error.
Patient care is at the heart of every hospital, and one increasingly popular method of enhancing the safety of patients is mobile carts.
Medication delivery is a crucial part of the prevention, management, and cure of a wide range of physical and mental conditions, and physicians can now administer medications at the patient bedside. With this advancement, medical staff can use mobile medication carts to improve patient safety in several ways.
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One of the most critical risks in any facility providing patients with medications is the possibility of a physician transferring a potentially life-threatening infection during medication administration.
Some hospitals have a central medication area where there may be many physicians waiting to receive prescriptions from a pharmacist. With so many people in the same space, the risk of infection passing from surfaces to one person then onto another increase. When those physicians then walk back to their separate patients, they can spread the viruses throughout the facility and to the person they are treating.
A mobile medication cart allows a physician to load their medications on to the unit before they begin their rounds. Before attending patient rooms or bedsides, they can follow a disinfection procedure to reduce the risk of infection transference.
Medication carts can carry wipes, sprays, gowns, gloves, masks, and other equipment the physician can use and then dispose of utilizing a biohazard container on the unit, helping to safeguard the patient. Performing these measures before and after each patient's treatment can significantly reduce the chance of a patient catching an infection from their physician.
Storing medication safely and securely is essential. Not only will it prevent the theft of powerful and potentially dangerous pharmaceuticals, but it also allows a physician to easily locate each item.
You can label medication drawers and have a daily review procedure, ensuring each drawer always has the requisite number of medicines, which could save lives in the event of a medical emergency.
For more routine daily events, having medication locked in secure drawers helps to keep your patients safe. As only qualified, trained, and vetted staff should have access to pharmaceuticals, you can give access codes only to those who are authorized to administer the medicines.
While a lock and key mechanism may be suitable, staff can lose keys, locking the medications away until they locate a spare set. A determined patient, such as a drug addict, could also break into this kind of locking system, causing harm to themselves and possibly others.
However, a more robust security option is a system with a biometric locking mechanism and a proximity scanning feature. Once an employee closes a drawer, the system will electronically keep it secure, until presented with a key code with the necessary imprinted access codes.
As the scanners require the card to be within a predetermined distance, the drawers will only open when authorized personnel are nearby.
Once open, the physician can remove medications and present them with a barcode scanner that will record the date and time of removal, the physician who prescribed the medicine, and which patient received the medication.
As patients may not be well enough to remember if a physician gave them medication, this is an effective safeguarding measure for them and hospital staff.
Should a patient ask for more medicine, physicians can see the record on their file, which the medication cart automatically generated upon prescription. This recording system reduces the chance of an overdose and the prescribing of medications, which may have contraindications with previously received drugs.
Medication carts can be extremely useful for improving patient safety. Not only do they considerably reduce the risk of infection transference, but they also record what medications physicians prescribed, and when they did so, reducing the chance of overdose or receiving drugs which may cause a harmful interaction.