Safe Medication Management for Nurses and Midwives
Safe Medication Management
The Safe Medication Management course is designed to provide relevant health professionals with training in safe administration of medication.
The safe administration of medication is a crucial skill and key professional development in healthcare. Administering medication is an obviously important task. The goal of this course is to provide suitably qualified nurses and midwives with an understanding of best practice for safe medication management, medication administration and medication calculation.
Improve Patient Safety by Eliminating Medication Errors
All nurses and midwives need to be familiar with the current standards of practice for their level of registration. Unfortunately, the reality is that medication administration is a task with a known high rate of error. While there are numerous contributing factors, the responsibility lies with nurses and midwives to make sure medication administration is safe.
The 7 rights of safe medication administration are:
- Right patient
- Right medication
- Right dose
- Right time
- Right route
- Right season
- Right documentation.
In addition; the right prescription, the right indication for administering a medication, the right response to a medication - and the person's right to refuse medication all contribute to improving patient safety and preventing errors.
Australian Safety and Quality Standards
This training package assists clinicians' understanding of selected aspects of the following Australian safety and quality standards.
National Safety and Quality Health Service (NSQHS) Standards (2017)
- Standard 4 - Medication Safety
Aged Care Quality Standards (2019)
- Standard 2 - Ongoing assessment and planning with consumers
- Standard 3 - Personal care and clinical care
National Standards for Mental Health Services (2010)
- Standard 2 - Safety
- Standard 10.5 - Treatment and Support
Learning Outcomes for Safe Medication Management
Safe Medication Management is designed to train the learner in the following.
- Understand the responsibility to safely administer medication and reduce the risk of a medication or adverse drug event occurring.
- The ability to identify key risk points in the medication administration process, as well as strategies to minimise these risks.
- Accurately calculate drug and medication dosages, including tablets, mixture and solutions, and intravenous flow and drip rates.
This online course covers risk, responsibilities, how to reduce risk and how to reduce risk. The is divided into the following sections.
Risks in medication management
- Your responsibility
- Reducing the risk of medication errors
- Calculating medications
- Calculating tablet doses
- Calculating mixtures and solutions
- Calculating intravenous fluid volumes and rates.
The course also contains a comprehensive menu of non-mandatory further resources. This is divided into the following.
Common terms in medication management
- Legislation regarding management
- The 7 rights (printable poster)
- Steps to perform a calculation (printable poster)
- Terms and abbreviations - measurements (table)
- Terms and abbreviations - times (table)
- Terms and abbreviations - routes (table)
- Course reference list
Target Audience
The course is designed for qualified nurses and midwives whose scope of practice includes the administration of medications and intravenous (IV) therapy.
This course compliments a healthcare organisation's existing training and may be used for CPD.
Course features
Safe Medication Management is a focused online training course featuring the following.
- 60 minutes course duration (excludes Further resources section)
- Interactive activities
- Calculation practice case studies
- Downloadable posters
- Homepage with chunked sections and intuitive usability
- Accessibility functions. WCAG AA compliance with customisable features
- Full course voiceover
- Assessments at the end of each section
- Certificate of completion
- Adaptics - Kineo’s pre-assessment technology
Endorsement
Endorsed by the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association (AHHA).
The AHHA endorses this course as meeting AHHA’s standards for educational quality and usability with the content having been developed by an appropriately credentialed subject matter expert.
