The role of a care home manager is complex, but ATLAS eMAR makes it easier

If you’re a manager at a care home, or a deputy manager, then you’ll understand how challenging the current environment can be in your goal to maintain high standards of care and resident wellbeing, especially when it comes to medication management. 

Even with the advent of medication management technologies, such as the electronic medication management system ATLAS eMAR, the challenges of ensuring safe and efficient administration of medications persists. These challenges are made more profound by an industry-wide lack of nurses, a lack of training opportunities or time to dedicate to training, and an increasingly complex environment of care that residents require, not to mention the changing regulations around overall resident wellbeing and how that relates to safety in medication management. 

Safety as the benchmark for medications 

Even though systems like ATLAS eMAR have made great strides in ensuring safe and reliable medication administration, there are still issues in the industry. For example, it was said recently said at the UK Care Week that even now, the number one reason that care home’s fail CQC inspections for the ‘safe’ standard is down to medication errors.  

However, as evidenced by the fact that ATLAS eMAR is responsible for averting millions of medication errors a year, and independent studies point to a demonstrable improvement in medication safety by using ATLAS eMAR, the only way forward to ensure the highest levels of safety for residents when it comes to medication is through digital technologies. 

Safety is, of course, one of the most important aspects. But as a home manager or deputy manager, we understand that you will be dealing with many other challenges too.  

Control the full cycle of medication management 

If you’re a deputy or full home manager, you might be responsible for the complete cycle of medication management (or you might have a dedicated medication lead for this). One of the biggest hurdles for the successful management of the full medication cycle is ordering and the receipt of medication before it has been administered. Historically, it has been the case for home managers that sometimes the auditing process of medications can be a time-consuming process, where you’re often spending the vast majority of the time needed to audit looking for mistakes, rather than processing the stock. 

We understand, however, that you might still be using a paper system because it works well enough for your home. However, sometimes it isn’t until you see how efficient operations could be that you realise how inefficient they are at the moment. In other words, booking in of medication doesn’t necessarily have to take an entire morning, and if you invest in ATLAS eMAR, you’ll quickly see that in action. 

For example, one of our customers spoke to us recently about how ATLAS eMAR has significantly reduced the time it takes them to book in medication – cutting down the time it took to book in medicines from three hours to just ten minutes. 

Get precious time back 

This is an incredible time-saving feature of ATLAS eMAR because the system works so efficiently that you don’t have to second-guess or audit every item of stock. It means you won’t be stuck in a back office having to sift through a mountain of paperwork – the system works in real-time to give anyone administering medication a series of prompts to let them know that a medication is due to be ordered because it is running low. Not only this, but when medication is booked into a home, it is added to the existing running stock level.  

This means you don’t have to take the time to work out what the discrepancy might be, or you won’t have to deal with the consequences of over or under ordering as a result of medication not being carried over, which can be the case with paper. In your role, there will naturally be a responsibility to manage budgets and keep spending as low as possible, and ATLAS eMAR will prevent a huge amount of medication being ordered unnecessarily or wasted, which will save you money in the long run. 

Couple this with ATLAS eMAR’s robust and improving pharmacy integration, which allows care homes to track the status of their orders – including items received, items not ordered and the percentage of prescriptions that have been processed – and you have a system that efficiently and safely brings stock records and medication ordering together, freeing you up from spending an entire morning, or even a day, booking in medication, or losing a senior member of staff for three hours to the task, and letting you focus on other areas of medication management that also need your attention. 

Manage staff time more effectively 

One of the most important of those areas is the efficient use of staff time. Not only are you, as a home manager, ultimately responsible for medication management (even if potentially through a dedicated medication lead), you’re ultimately responsible for everything in the home. For example, you might have found yourself in a situation before where you wanted to make greater use of night staff to administer items like pain relief when a resident wakes up, rather than having to wait for the day staff to start the medication round in the morning. But you might be concerned about doing this because night staff will have already been up and coming towards the end of their shift when residents wake up and therefore prone to errors. Ultimately, it’s more responsibility that you might not be comfortable asking them to take on, 

But as you’ll know, sometimes, certain medications need to be administered when they are needed, rather than waiting for specific times of the day. This might be when a resident is awake or receptive to taking the medication, but whatever the case, you need to be agile with the way you maximise staff time. 

ATLAS eMAR lets you do just that. In this example, staff would be barcode validating the medication at the point of administration, so the ATLAS eMAR system would remove the risk of selecting incorrect medication. Not only can you relax if faced with this scenario, safe in the knowledge that the right medication has been administered, but residents will be receiving their pain killers before they are up and about and therefore their pain will be managed much better.