Are you a care home compliance manager? Then here’s how ATLAS eMAR helps you stay ahead of regulatory requirements

As a care home compliance manager, then you’ll know how big the challenges of staying up to date with regulations, conducting internal audits and implementing broad compliance frameworks are.  

With medication management especially – an area where compliance and safety are most important – the challenge can often be more than just eliminating errors to ensure safety, but discovering where those errors, previously unseen or unrecorded, are happening, and to ensure the reports are complete and accurate. 

And we know that, as a compliance manager working in care homes, implementing new systems – especially digital technologies – to improve the lives of both residents and staff is vital, so that is why we’re discussing how ATLAS eMAR can be an invaluable tool at your disposal to ensure easy and efficient regulatory compliance with medication management. 

Comply with safety regulations 

Safety isn’t just one of the standards by which the CQC measures regulatory compliance, it is the bedrock of all good care in care homes. Without a safe level of care, everything else will suffer. So as a compliance manager, you need to be able to know, with confidence, that the system you employ is helping your care staff to administer medications safely, without you having to always actively monitor and check. It’s one thing to put policies and procedures in place, it’s another to know and ensure they’re being followed correctly. 

ATLAS eMAR’s barcode scanning technology, which scans the unique barcodes for every medication to ensure that the five rights can be adhered to, means that the staff responsible for administering medicines are given exactly the right information to avoid medication errors, such as giving a dose too early, to the wrong resident or being the wrong medication altogether. Likewise, when the medication is administered, a series of alerts automatically come up to show low stock levels, so the staff are informed with nine days' notice when stock of a medication is running low.  

These features and more like them not only makes their lives easier, but the information on medication administration goes directly into the manager’s dashboard, also known as ATLAS Central, which means you have full oversight of medication management. 

Be sure that your policies are followed 

Having that level of oversight means that as a compliance manager, there is a crucial change in the way you can undertake your responsibilities. With paper records, you might have spent a large chunk of your job finding issues to deal with. Naturally, this takes up a huge amount of time that could otherwise we spent in other areas. Instead, with ATLAS Central, you don’t have to look for problems to solve – the issues that exist present themselves to you, and the data can be analysed in a more efficient way. 

The time you’re not having to spend sifting through the records, looking for problems to solve, can be put to far better use in order areas and gives you more time to focus on navigating the constantly changing landscape of legislation as well as actually preparing for inspections themselves.  

Rather than just identifying problems, ATLAS eMAR gives you the time and resources to solve them. 

With ATLAS Central, you have a clear and precise view of whether or not your medication policies, set out in conjunction with the regulations with which you must ensure compliance, are being followed as completely as they should be.  

If you’re still using a paper system, it can be quite common for errors to go unreported in documentation due to the fast-paced and challenging roles of those administering medication; but not just this, it’s also difficult to really understand, if you manage compliance for a larger care group, which home might need more training or more guidance than others. In short, you don’t know where to look for the problems. 

The information pulled through to ATLAS Central is done so in real-time, meaning that compliance managers have a completely up-to-date record of every data point they need to ensure that the care home is compliant with regulations, and gives you valuable insights into which homes or which members of staff require more support. More still, this data serves as a ready-made audit trail that is crucial for evidencing this adherence. 

Always be inspection-ready with ATLAS eMAR 

With an all-in-one medication management system like ATLAS eMAR, part of and integrated with the Connected Care Platform, you can be sure as a compliance manager that your care homes are not just meeting regulatory expectations but exceeding them. You can improve the lives of both residents and staff, you can be sure of accurate and reliable reports, and you can have crucial time given back to focus on communicating legislation changes, reviewing and updating protocols and procedures, and helping care homes be more ready than ever for inspections.