Most online medication courses provide nothing more than a ‘tick a box’ approach to training. They are not written by experts. They are often called ‘Medicines Awareness’ training.
It’s not enough to be ‘aware’ of medicines. Would you feel safe being driven by someone who was ‘aware’ of what a car was, but who’d never been taught to drive, let alone been assessed as competent?
Staff need to be trained to administer medicines, not just be aware of them and they need to be assessed as competent. Administering medicines safely means administering medicines systematically. This means not just grabbing the box and skim reading the label, but working slowly and methodically.
We have been teaching medicines administration since 2003. Based on over 15 years of research in the field, we’ve an established approach to administering medication that uses a methodical 12-step approach that focuses on competence. It is this approach that we provide in our face to face and online courses.
Our Foundation Course in Medicines Administration teaches medicines administration as a 12-step process. Based on our years of research into why medication errors occur, this course ensures medicines are given in a safe and systematic way, thereby reducing the risk of errors made through complacency. It is based on our face-to-face workshop that has been shown to reduce medication errors by 36% in a study by Hampshire County Council. This course is specific to care homes.
The Virtual Medicines Round is an online competence assessment testing a learner’s skills at checking the 6 rights of medicines administration. The learner is presented with a number of medicines and their charts. Many of the medicines contain mistakes. The learner must correctly state if they’ll administer the medicine, or if not, what’s wrong with it. This works well as a robust competence assessment for both new and existing staff.
We offer these two products as a combined bundle for those wishing staff to learn medicines administration and then sit a competence assessment afterwards. This forms a very comprehensive training approach focused on reducing medication errors, thus keeping your clients safe and well cared for.
CQC expect you to have a certain level of knowledge about the medicines you administer. As a starting point, you need to know where to go for reliable medicines information. In addition, you should also know about those medicines which carry a higher-risk to those you support. The course will get you familiar with these so called “higher risk” medicines: what problems to lookout for, how to monitor these medicines and what to do if things go wrong.