Medicine handling tips for care sector

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain's document The Handling of Medicines in Social Care provides guidance on improving the safety of medicine management. It shows how to appropriately handle medicine in services such as residential care homes, foster care and residential schools.

The guidance follows a 2006 report by the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI), which criticised standards of medication handling. It found cases of poor recording of medicines received and administered, medicines being inappropriately handled by unqualified staff and medicines not being stored properly. The CSCI said residential homes needed to put medication management at thetop of their agenda.

According to the new guidance, special residential schools and boarding schools should consider storing medicine young people need on a regular basis and help them to take their medicine.

In childcare and early education settings, the medication policy should include getting written consent from parents to dispense medication to a child, which medicines a worker can give once they are trained and what supervision there should be if the child takes their own medicine.

For children in foster care, the guidance says handling medicine will not differ from normal households, but carers should store medicine properly, support children taking their own medication and be given full information about when and how they should give it.

Jonathan Stanley, manager of the National Centre for Excellence in Residential Child Care, said the guidance would help pharmacists understand social care. "This guidance is not just another set of rules for the pharmacist community, but offers practical methods for safe practice," he said.

Karen Deacon, director of health and social care at the National Centre for Young People with Epilepsy, said: "In communities where there are single care homes without support, it will definitely be advantageous."

- www.rpsgb.org.uk.