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Create a solid policy to meet troublesome JCAHO standards

Staff Development Weekly: Insight on Evidence-Based Practice in Education, January 5, 2007

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MM.2.20, storing medications correctly and safely, proved to be one of the most problematic standards in 2006 and will continue to challenge hospitals in 2007. The best way to comply with this standard is to create a good policy and follow it.

The following are tips that can be used for complying with MM.2.20:

• Have a clearly defined policy for medication storage in all instances.
• If your practice did not follow policy relative to documenting or monitoring the temperature of medication refrigerators and freezers, don't fill out the log/form as if you did it correctly. That puts you at risk for falsification. Write "not documented" and initial or follow your hospital policy for late entry.
• Always segregate any expired, damaged, or contaminated discharged patients' medications that are going to be picked up by the pharmacy.
• Make sure hospital policy defines who is authorized by law and regulation to have access to medications.

To get more tips, go to Briefings on JCAHO (BOJ). For the cost of just three stories, you can get the entire January issue of BOJ. Click here to choose between the PDF and HTML versions for just $30. Subscribers to the online version of BOJ have free access to this article. Subscribers to the print newsletter can find this article in their January issue.

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