Administration of Medication

Section 300 Section 300.1630  Administration of Medication a)         All medications shall be administered only by personnel who are licensed to administer medications, in accordance with their respective licensing requirements.  Licensed practical nurses shall have successfully completed a course in pharmacology or have at least one year's full-time supervised experience in administering medications in a health care setting if their duties include administering medications to residents. 1)         Medications shall be administered as soon as possible after doses are prepared at the facility and shall be administered by the same person who prepared the doses for administration, except under single unit dose packaged distribution systems. 2)         Each dose administered shall be properly recorded in the clinical record by the person who administered the dose.  (See Section 300.1810.) 3)         Self-administration of medication shall be permitted only upon the written order of the licensed prescriber. b)         The facility shall have medication records that shall be used and checked against the licensed prescriber's orders to assure proper administration of medicine to each resident.  Medication records shall include or be accompanied by recent photographs or other means of easy, accurate resident identification. Medication records shall contain the resident's name, diagnoses, known allergies, current medications, dosages, directions for use, and, if available , a history of prescription and non-prescription medications taken by the resident during the 30 days prior to admission to the facility. c)         Medications prescribed for one resident shall not be administered to another resident. d)         If, for any reason, a licensed prescriber's medication order cannot be followed, the licensed prescriber shall be notified as soon as is reasonable, depending upon the situation, and a notation made in the resident's record. e)         Medication errors and drug reactions shall be immediately reported to the resident's physician, licensed prescriber if other than a physician, the consulting pharmacist and the dispensing pharmacist (if the consulting pharmacist and dispensing pharmacist are not associated with the same pharmacy).  An entry shall be made in the resident's clinical record, and the error or reaction shall also be described in an incident report. f)         Nurses' stations shall be equipped as per Sections 300.2860 or 300.3060 and shall have all necessary items readily available for the proper administration of medications. g)         Current medication references shall be available, such as the current edition of "Drug Facts and Comparisons", "Hospital Formulary", "USP-DI (United States Pharmacopeia-Drug Information)", "Physician's Desk Reference" or other suitable references.