06.18.2025 PCS
How to ensure safety and wellbeing when managing medications for people living with dementia in care homes
For those who are responsible for administering medicines in care homes, it’s important to ensure maximum safety for every resident and their medication needs, but it’s especially important to consider the way in which medications need to be administered and managed for people who are living with dementia in care.
In many instances, additional measures might be needed to ensure that people living with dementia in care take their medications as directed, and in a way that upholds their dignity, wellbeing and adheres to regulatory guidelines.
Let’s delve into the safety considerations for dementia and medication, where we will give you tips and best practices that aim to minimise risk, improve outcomes and ensure continued physical and mental wellbeing for everybody in care living with dementia.
Maintain a person-centred approach
Ensuring that the resident remains central and involved, where possible, in all decisions made about their care is crucial to upholding their personal dignity and wellbeing. This is especially important when it comes to medication management and how it relates to dementia. As regulations and up to date best practice guidelines suggest, residents should always be made part of the decision-making process in care, and for medications they should always be encouraged to self-administer where possible.
While it might be more difficult to support someone living with dementia to self-administer medications, you might benefit from understanding the individual's preferences, routines and personal history, which can give you valuable insight in how to go about supporting residents if possible to self-administer, to understand their medication needs and to guide how medication can be administered safely and with dignity. This also goes a long way to maintaining a person-centred approach to medication administration for people with dementia.
Another important aspect of ensuring person-centred care is honouring one of the expanded R’s in the rights of medication: the right to refuse. In keeping the medication administration process person-centred but also safe and effective, you should always respect the person’s right to refuse medication, while assessing capacity to do so. That said, you should always conduct investigations into the underlying reasons for refusal, whether it is because of pain, environmental changes, taste or confusion or any other reason.
This is especially important for those living with dementia, as they might not understand or remember why the medication is required. This is also where it is important to consider the best strategies for administration under the Mental Capacity Act, where capacity assessments and best interest principles will need to be considered.
Engage in regular medication reviews
Because those who live with dementia are often unable to communicate their issues as well as they want to, for example if they are experiencing increasing pain or discomfort, there can be an issue of not providing enough medication for long-term pain or overmedicating for the opposite reason.
Likewise, people living with dementia are sometimes prescribed antipsychotic or sedative medications to manage challenging behaviour, but these types of medications pose significant risks and side effects and should only be used when all other avenues of intervention have been exhausted.
The aim is to ensure that each medication remains safe, effective and above all necessary. As such, regular and comprehensive medication reviews should be undertaken to monitor the continued necessity of certain medications. These should be carried out ideally every six to twelve months, or whenever there has been a significant change in resident wellbeing, but in the case of someone living with dementia, they may need to be even more regular.
In addition to this, observations should always be maintained to consider changes in mood, behaviour or cognitive ability after starting or ending a medication.
Staff training
Knowing that staff training levels are kept at a sufficient level and standard is also crucial, as staff who are responsible for administering medications to residents won’t just need to receive the appropriate training to do so, but also training that focuses on dementia care would also mean that they are better equipped to ensure medication safety when administering for people living with dementia. This type of training would consider how to approach dementia care, how to tailor specifically to it, and therefore how to make each medication round more personal.
Whether it’s understanding the side effects and risks associated with common types of medications, or the potential for interactions, as well as knowing how to care for people living with dementia – these are essential for safe practice and good outcomes.
Harnessing the latest digital technology to improve safety
All of the best practice concepts listed above to ensure medication safety and best outcomes for people with dementia can be achieved with ATLAS eMAR, as well as other products in Person Centred Software’s Connected Care Platform. Best practices in medication management, especially those that are crucial to dementia care such as administration, pharmacy integration, regulatory compliance and more, can be achieved with ATLAS eMAR: a system designed to improve safety, efficiency and outcomes for medication management.
