A free 1 hour course
Safe Management of Medicines for Social Care Staff
The Safe Management of Medicines for Social Care Staff elearning modules are aimed at the non-registered medicines workforce, focusing on the knowledge and skills necessary to handle and administer medicines safely in domiciliary and residential settings. It also explains some of the differences between handling medicines in residential care homes compared with nursing care homes. The materials are based on the requirements of the CQC and NICE.
The learning is split into 4 modules which each take approximately 30 to 60 minutes to complete:
Module 1: Introduction to Handling Medicines Safely
Module 2: Administering Medication
Module 3: Ordering, receiving, storing and disposal of medicines
Module 4: Understanding Medicines
The elearning modules have been designed primarily to support social care staff. However, informal carers, such as unpaid carers helping a family member, neighbour, or friend should find useful.
At the end the course learners will be able to:
• describe their roles and responsibilities in relation to managing medicines (including training, legislation, policies, record keeping and medicines safety)
• describe the process for safely administering medicines via the common range of administration routes
• describe the process for ordering, storing, and disposing of medicines in different social care settings
• describe safe processes for the general use of medicines in social care settings (including when required medicines, homely remedies, and covert administration)
A wide range of the non-registered and registered workforce, patients and their carers all contribute to safe handling and administration of medicine. It is important that people are trained appropriately to manage medicines safely and that people are supported to make shared decisions about medicines.
NHS England North School of Pharmacy and Medicines Optimisation worked with health and social care colleagues to develop a collection of medicines related training resources for non-registered staff across the wider workforce.
Additional resources linked to the programme can be found here: An Interactive Guide to What good looks like for assisted medicines taking
Safe management of medicines for social care staff - elearning for healthcare