Your Role with Medications
As a home care worker, you may be asked to assist some of your clients with the self-administration of medication. Self-administration means that the client swallows, applies, inhales, or inserts the medication into his or her own body. Assistance with self-administration means that you can help the client with certain parts of this activity, such as through limited hands-on assistance, encouragement, and reminding.
Your role is one of assisting. Under no circumstance should you take on the total responsibility for setting up a medication or administering it. When the Care Plan specifies, you are permitted to:
Your role will differ with each case. The exact tasks and responsibilities will be included in the Care Plan, and you should not assist the client with medications unless the instructions are written there. If you have any questions, you should contact your supervisor. When documenting your tasks, you should use the word “assisting” rather than “administering” or “giving” since that’s what you’re doing and because assisting with self-administration of medication is an extremely important task! |