Clare's Pledge was to tidy the patient medication drawers in their lockers.
On the ward all patients have a locker with a lockable drawer that contains their patient named medications. T
he drawers very often become full with several boxes of each type of medication. Sometimes many boxes of the same medication can all be in use at the same time.
This means more time can be spent by the nurse administering the medicines trying to find the medications they need to dispense and it also incurs more time for the pharmacy technician to check stocks.
Clare came up with an idea to buy a plastic box with a lid to pop in the back of the drawer to store extra medicines and PRN medicines so as the only medication boxes that were at the front of the drawer were the ones in use.
Initially she trialled this on one 6 bedded bay then extended this to the rest of the ward.
It was found that it didn't work with lids on the boxes as it was difficult to manoeuvre the lid off with it being at the back of the cupboard
So the box without a lid was used.
Drawers are now much tidier and it takes less time for the nurses to find a medication to administer and less time for the pharmacy technicians to ascertain what stocks are needed.
Such a simple idea but a huge time saving impact.