What can you do to ensure a person is managing their self-medication in community care?

 

 

Answered by Sheila Scott

Many thanks for your question. Assessing someone’s mental capacity is an important part of care planning and risk assessing. With regards to medication and self-management, the person must have the capacity to remember to take the correct medication via the right route, at the right time and the right dose. They must also have the physical capacity to open bottles/ medication packaging and to see what medication they require.  If someone has been assessed as having the capacity to self-manage, It’s important care staff continuously assess capacity, monitoring for any signs of changes, for example, forgetfulness, medication being left out and not taken, medication stock building up and not being used, so encourage staff to keep an eye on how much medication is left.  Where staff are having to remind a service user to take medication this moves from fully self-managed and will need to be documented.  NICE guidance has information on medication management and self-management that might be helpful.