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Discussion

Constantly anxious

I currently work as a caregiver in an assisted living facility, I've worked there for about two months, but worked in another one before that for about 6. I'm currently in school to become a nurse. I'm having a huge problem

though.

I am so constantly afraid of making medication errors. We have the paper MARS still at our facility, and I feel like it is so easy to make a mistake with them. I have never made a medication error yet, but I get so paranoid about making one still. Sometimes I will go back and check then double check to make sure that I gave a medication correctly, will have someone else check to make sure, and even still come home and just worry and worry. Tonight for example, we have a woman in our facility that we take her blood pressure every night. I don't usually do her medication, so I was being extra cautious. He blood pressure was really high, so I made a note for the next shift to recheck it later and gave her all her medication that she needed for the night and left. I mentioned it to another older more experience caregiver, and she said that the medication that I gave her had a blood pressure pill in it so it should be okay. For some reason, I'm freaking out and worried that I didn't give her her blood pressure medication. I know I did, I signed for all the medicines that were due at that time and gave her all the ones that were there to give during that time, but I am sitting at home almost sick with worry! There have been times where I have made a fool of myself by calling the facility and asking the shift after me to double check that I did certain things right, and I don't want to do it again!

I can't go on like this obviously, what do I do?

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    Counting the pills u should have and then how many you are giving is a quick way to check that you have all the meds you should. I do that at every med pass. Other then that you just have to trust yourself more.

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    You shouldn't know you passed a BP med because you passed all the medicines indicated. You should know you passed a BP med because you either recognized it as such from the MAR or you looked it up to see what you were giving. You should never give a med if you don't know what it does.

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    Do you not look at the meds you're giving, or just dump them all together and hope for the best? What if her BP had been dangerously low? You still would have likely given the BP med and caused serious harm to the patient.

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    Do you not look at the meds you're giving, or just dump them all together and hope for the best? What if her BP had been dangerously low? You still would have likely given the BP med and caused serious harm to the patient.

    From what I gather, she is a caregiver not a nurse. In the ALF setting it is very common for a med tech to pass medications without having any knowledge in regards to what the meds do. She doesn't have a license to lose at this point.

    OP I think it's a horrible idea to have non-nurses passing meds after taking a short class on med safety. It's dangerous. But I'm pretty sure the only things for you to do are either quit, or learn some CBT of some sort to help you "calm down".

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    I think meds are in a bubble pack .... How would she know what is what with her level of training?

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    • Author

    I am not a nurse no, I'm not even in nursing school technically yet, I'm still taking the prerequisites. They are in bubble packs, I have no idea what most of those medications to just because I was never really trained on what medications do what. Sometimes the medications aren't even in bubble packs, they're in those daily medication containers and we just dump them out and give it to them.

    I know I gave her all the medications that were listed in her MAR and that were in the bubble pack chunk for the nighttime med pass, I just get paranoid that "oh perhaps I didn't and now she's going to die".

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