Controlled drugs and next steps of managing medicines

Ensuring drugs and medicines are made available to you is vital in caring for patients properly. But there are compliances to meet, which come with responsibilities and requirements.

The cases in which individuals are not meeting compliances with controlled drugs are concerning. As you will hopefully be aware, this was picked up by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in the April inspection, but of course is a long-term issue we’ve been aware of for some time.

Everyone who manages the use of controlled drugs takes responsibility for it, and any practices where this management falls short of standards will be picked up on and dealt with through the Medicines Management Policy.

The Senior Leadership Board (SLB) discussed this week the key matters of managing our medicines more safely, whether they’re controlled drugs, prescription-only medicines or other drugs we use and that this has to be in line with systems and processes to get them to work effectively everywhere.

The debate covered our changing needs including estates, clinical compliance, digital technology, issuing drugs, and finance. A decision was made to reform the presented options further and to take it to Executive Leadership Board (ELB) for decision. The outcomes will be shared widely as soon as possible so that progress can continue in making sure we have a safe, relevant, compliant management of medicines.

Published 12th January, 2017