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Medicine Chest Medicines Overview
It is our goal to provide a comprehensive overview of medicine
information using layman's terminology.
I have dealt with medicine information as a part of the medical community for the past 20 years it has been my experience that people often do not understand the medicines effects or the medicines information as it is being related to them.
This leads to frustration and a lack of compliance with medicine regimens.
The public continues to place 100% trust in medical professionals, which without malicious intent, overlook the need for public knowledge. While more emphasis has been placed on this over the past few year, the better part of the public is still without much knowledge or understanding of diseases, disease processes or the treatments of those disease processes.
With more medicine comes the risk of more treatment errors and medicine misdosing.
While the medical community continues to strive for an error free medication environment, the public needs to take responsibility for their own health and well-being. It is the attempt of this site to further assist public understanding regarding medicine and medications which will in turn benefit professionals in the delivery of care.
5 Rights of Medication administration
With prescribing/distributing or administering medications, there are certain guild lines and laws medical professionals must abide by which include the 5 rights in medication administration.
#1 The Right Patient
Defined by 3 checks: Armband, identification or picture.
#2 The Right Medication
While this speaks for itself, the medical community needs
to be accessing medicine before they actually distribute that
it to the public. Defined by looking at color and shape.
#3 The Right Dose
All professionals who deal with medicines have to have some
knowledge of what a typical dose of a medication is. This is
a nice double check to ensure the wrong dosages won't be
administered which could cause grave harm to people in general.
#4 The Right Route
There are many routes of administering medication
and abbreviations can get missed with some of the typical
hand writing on prescriptions. It is the responsibility
of the medical community to ensure that medications are
delivered via the route to which they were made.
Medications that are delivered through the wrong route
could mean a different absorption rate into the body.
#5 The Correct Time
Medications delivered at the wrong times could change
the effectiveness of treatment. Therefore, it is
essential that medications are delivered as indicated
and ordered.
While that covers the 5 rights of medication administration generally
taught to most students, there are 2 more rights that are being
integrated in which are not currently recognized.
These include:
The Correct Documentation: By any standards within
the medical community, if it's not documented, it's not done.
The Last of these Rights would include:
The Right Reason:
More and more emphasis is being placed on all medical personal
to know current, correct treatments of diseases and their processes.
Ignorance is no excuse as most surveyors would say. Ultimately, it
benefits both patients and people in the field of medicine for the public
to have the latest medication information. |
