Med education

I would like to hear from other psych nurses about how you do medication education on an acute care adult psych unit? JCAHO wants individualized med. ed., and yet our program is so group oriented. It is very difficult to get individualized time with a group session. Any suggestions?

Yes I know what you mean! I squeeze it in at discharge. :)

This website http://www.treatmentteam.com offers 8 workbooks covering subjects such as understanding symptoms, understanding diagnosis, understanding meds, etc. They are great and can be used in group or individual sessions. The workbooks do not go into specific meds (which is probably more of what you had in mind), but they do help patients understand the importance of compliance.

Thank you. I will check that website out. The nurses on our unit are open to ideas. There has to be a better way to meet JCAHO standards than what we have been currently doing.

At our facility, which is child/adolescent, we give each child some med education at every med pass. It only takes a matter of several extra seconds. First we teach them the med names, pointing to each pill in the cup so they learn which is which. Then when they can point them out back to us, stating the names we teach doses. Then on to purposes (ie: depression, mood, anger, hallucinations), then a side effect. It sounds like it would take forever, but with each child having 2 to 3 or more med passes daily, they learn it very quickly. As for time consuming during the pass, I pass 48 kids, doing this with each, in about an hour.

Amazingly to me, kids as young as 5 learn about their meds with amazing success. :monkeydance:

I would like to hear from other psych nurses about how you do medication education on an acute care adult psych unit? JCAHO wants individualized med. ed., and yet our program is so group oriented. It is very difficult to get individualized time with a group session. Any suggestions?

I found that the group education process was ineffective. Expecially with acute psych. I would do 1:1 education on an individual basis @ med pass.

It seemed to be effective. In my experience, most psych patients don't do well in structured groups. The 1:1 interaction is informal and addresses the patients specific meds.

We use both groups and 1:1 for med ed. Individualized med ed can be done in a group setting provided the group is not too large. The format is along these lines; "today I'd like to talk about antidepressents. In general they are used for ... These are some of the common ones ... Does anyone take any of those? What ones ... Have you noticed any effects? any side effects. you might experience these side effects"