"Right" way to pulls meds from cards?

Eleven011 · Nov 14, 2015

Has anyone ever heard of signing the bubble card in marker to show that you gave the med? Date and initial? I was told by one nurse it is illegal to mark up the cards.
To me it seems like you can only "sign" that you popped out the med , there is no guarantee it was given correctly to the correct person, or at the correct time....
And we are documenting the the MAR as well.

Yes we did this with prn med cards. By the bubble, we would date, time and initial.

quiltynurse56, LPN, LVN · Nov 14, 2015

The places I worked, we usually had the meds in room/patient/resident order and having them in order the same as the order on the MAR.

This is how ours are done. Each card is marked with the time of day. Ex: morning, lunch , afternoon, evening, HS. Then in the order on the MAR. I pull all the ones for each resident needed for that med pass (1 resident at a time). We then put them in the back of that resident's section of cards so that the next med pass meds are in front.

Most of us pull out the cards for the med pass as sometimes it might bounce out of the cup, not often, and then we don't have to go looking for it.

Karou · Nov 14, 2015

Has anyone ever heard of signing the bubble card in marker to show that you gave the med? Date and initial? I was told by one nurse it is illegal to mark up the cards.
To me it seems like you can only "sign" that you popped out the med , there is no guarantee it was given correctly to the correct person, or at the correct time....
And we are documenting the the MAR as well.

Once and a while when I worked in LTC, management would require us to do this. Usually when they suspected a nurse wasn't passing medication. It was just a way to ensure/prove the pill had been popped out. They also would have us secretly count/mark them to see if a nurse was passing her medications.

flashpoint · Nov 14, 2015

We color code our cards according to which med pass we are giving them. We use one card per drug no matter how many times it is given during the day. We pull ours our completely. our drawers are so long that I don't think most of us could reach clear to the back to pop the pill while leaving the card in place. The color coding speeds things up quite a bit.

Adele_Michal7, ASN, RN · Nov 15, 2015

Once and a while when I worked in LTC, management would require us to do this. Usually when they suspected a nurse wasn't passing medication. It was just a way to ensure/prove the pill had been popped out. They also would have us secretly count/mark them to see if a nurse was passing her medications.

I've seen this done and I hate it!

OldGrayNurse · Nov 17, 2015

Taping the back of bubbles isn't just against DHEC regs in Indiana. It is in South Carolina too. That's a huge no-no. And, insane. Bubble packs were invented in the bowels of hell.