G13 Quality improvement project: parent administration of medication in a tertiary neonatal unit. (May 2019) - Cochrane, C
Abstract : Background: Parents may need to give their baby medications after discharge from the neonatal unit. Our unit has reports of medication errors at home. If parents were to give medications during hospital stay it may save nursing time and increase parent confidence. Aims: Increase parent administration of medication in low dependency to 50% within 6 months. Reduce nurses' time giving medications and increase parent confidence with giving medications. Methods: Introduction of a programme to train parents to give their babies' medications during hospital stay. Parents were consented, given face-to-face training and provided with leaflets. The number of parents giving medications and nurses' time giving medications were measured. Parents completed surveys prior to the programme and before discharge. They were asked their confidence score for giving medications, with 1 'not confident at all' to 10 'very confident.' PDSA cycles were used to guide improvements and increase enrolment. Results: The first month was spent training staff. 20 weeks of data were collected; 78 babies were eligible and 49 entered (63%). In the last 4 weeks 87% were enrolled, 48% had parents independently administering medications; it took on average 1.7 days to progress from training to independently administering and average length of stay in low dependency was 12 days. There were 373 days of stay where parents had completed training. A nurse spends on average 30.4 min per day giving medications to 8 babies and it requires two nurses (7.6 min per baby). Additional time can be spent finding a second nurse. We estimate a saving of over 20 min per day of nurses' time giving medications. Mean parent confidence scores were 8.6/10 (n=40) prior to the programme and 9.9/10 (n=22) after training. Conclusion: Training parents to give medication saves nurses' time, with the potential to save over an hour per baby if parents are trained promptly and give medications for an average of 10 days. Training parents to give medications to their babies can increase parent confidence prior to discharge home.