Hi, I'm Cathy with Level Up RN. In this video, we will be talking about safe medication administration, including the rights of medication administration and medication administration best practices. At the end of the video, I'll be giving you guys a little quiz to test your knowledge of some of the key points I'll be covering. So definitely stay tuned for that. And I will be following along with our Level Up RN pharmacology flashcards. So if you have our flashcards, definitely pull those out so you can follow along with me and pay close attention to the bold red text on these cards, because those represent the most important facts that you are likely to get asked about on a nursing school exam.
In terms of the rights of safe medication administration, depending on what textbook or website you're looking at, you may see five rights of safe medication administration, up to 12 rights of safe medication administration. So it really varies across sources. There are kind of five core rights that you'll find that are common across all of these sources. And this includes the right patient, the right medication, the right dose, the right route, and the right time. Other rights that may be included in your textbook include the right patient education, the right for a patient to refuse their medication, the right nursing documentation, meaning charting, and then the right assessment before and after medication administration.
All right. Now that you have the rights of safe medication administration down, let's talk about some other best practices for medication administration. First of all, you want to identify your patient's allergies before you give them any medication. You should also question any illegible or incomplete medication order. Or if you see a prescription for a contraindicated medication or an inappropriate dose, definitely reach out to the provider to question those prescriptions. You only want to prepare medications for one patient at a time, and you only want to administer medications that you have personally prepared. There are also several high-alert medications that often require an independent double-check with another RN. So this may include heparin or insulin. And then another thing that's important to remember is that you never want to leave a medication at the patient's bedside.
So if you go in to give your patient a medication and they're like, "I don't really want to take it right now, you can just leave it here at the bedside." Nope, you don't want to do that. You bring it with you and then bring it back when the patient is willing to take that medication. And then finally, you need to complete an incident report for any medication error. And you never want to include this incident report in the patient's chart or refer to this incident report in the patient's chart because it's an internal document used for quality improvement at the facility. And better yet, how about no medication errors? Make sure you do your triple checks so you don't perform a medication error and harm your patient, and so you don't have to fill out one of those incident reports, which my understanding is not really a good time. So that is it for the material I'm going to cover in this video.
Next up, we have a quiz. All right. It's time for a quiz. I've got three questions for you. First question. When administering a high-alert medication, an independent double-check should be performed with a second RN. True or false? The answer is true. Question number two. Low-risk medications may be left at the bedside for the patient to take at their preferred timing. True or false? The answer is false. Medications should not be left unsecured at the bedside. Question number three. If a medication error occurs, an incident report should be completed and included in the patient's medical record. True or false? The answer is false. An incident report should not be included in the patient's medical record or referred to in the patient's medical record. All right. That's it for this video. Take care and good luck with studying.
