Vitals

[dallet6]

I work in a typical ltc facility. We have a combination of medicare A, medicaid and private pay residents. We are going to pointclickcare program in 2 weeks and just started training today. In the past when we gave blood pressure medications there were only a few where we would get bp's before giving them everyday. The house dr. may order weekly bp for people who are on the med for a long time etc. This program won't let you give bp meds to anyone without having taken a bp to enter. The day staff is trying to figure out how to get our med pass done on time if we can't start it right away. The aids do our vitals, but even if they went on got vitals on all their residents first, instead of getting them up, dressed, groomed and to the dining room, we still wouldn't be starting our med pass for awhile, not to mention the residents would not appreciate being late to breakfast and having to wait to toilet. The aids rule is they are supposed to have vitals in by 8, which also isn't always practical for them. So-they have them in by 8..I give no meds till them? Other option being the floor nurses should go do their own vitals on 20 residents? Before med pass? Do you see where I'm going with this? To further complicate things I believe we only have one or two bp med that even have a hold parameter. This isn't the only facility I've been to, and the others didn't do vitals before dressing or feeding either.

Anyone use point click care? Anyone have a facility where you don't give meds until however long it takes you to get vitals on all your residents? Noticing that some of you have 30-50 residents I'm sure that would be impossible.

[terraqueous]

Hi, we use Point Click Care at the LTC facility I work in also. We typically do bp's two times per week. When we click on a bp med to be given and the screen comes up that wants you to type in the bp, we can click the down arrow option and select "use last bp" rather than "new" which it will default to. This will automatically bring up the last one recorded. We have very few parameters to use also. I am usually the charge nurse but have worked several days as med pass lately and wasn't aware of this the first day......oh boy, way behind. One thing that really makes it quicker for the med nurses are the little wrist bp cuffs they can use quickly just before handing the med over. Once we got used to PCC, its quite nice and it seems like there's alot of customized options available to your facility.

[dallet6]

they showed us that today, but then said we couldn't use the one from the day before. After quite a bit of negative comments, the trainer realized it was an actual problem and said she'd discuss it with the DON. I hope they are willing to let us do that as well. When I first started we used to use wrist cuffs, but found such a sharp discrepancy from manual they aren't allowed to be used except in cases where there's no choice.

Everyone is telling us we'll love pcc, fingers crossed!

[chrisrn24]

I like PCC.

You can actually click "not applicable" as well.

If parameters are to check BP everytime then check, but if they are twice a week you can add to the MAR "twice weekly BP check this shift" and just use N/A for the rest.