Drug Diversion

Education regarding prevention of controlled substance diversion leads to greater patient safety as well as helps to address a greater public health need, keeping communities safe. Ensuring learners have advanced competency and commitment to patient, pharmacy, and community safety allows healthcare workers to play a part in minimizing the impact of drug abuse, particularly the ongoing opioid crisis.

Drug diversion can oftentimes be overlooked due to the lack of any possibility of diversion. Signs of drug diversion can thus be hard to detect, leading to it being underestimated and under-reported.

Detecting & Preventing Drug Diversion

Reviewing signs of drug diversions early in educational spaces of all healthcare disciplines can help learners become familiar with signs before moving on to real world practice. Training may include observing a worker’s physical behavior, appearance, work habits, and activities that may deviate from their usual self to recognizing new habits. New habits may include earlier access to an ADS before administering, taking out more doses than required leading to more waste, tampering with medication by diluting it, and more. Encourage learners to report anything they may deem suspicious or questionable.

Storing controlled substances in a secure location, such as a safe or storage vault in the pharmacy or electronically locking drawers with individually locking pockets in an ADS, limits access to authorized staff via passwords, badge swipes, and barcode scanning technology.

The use of cameras with secure recording in simulation areas where there is any risk of diversion, such as in storage, repackaging/compounding areas, and outpatient and procedural ADS stations, helps familiarize learners with what they may see in a real world environment.

Protecting our Communities Together

Ensuring learners have advanced competency and commitment to patient, pharmacy, and community safety allows us to play a part in minimizing the impact of drug diversion. Some steps we have taken to ensure repeated practice of the safe handling of medications include:

Recording & Debriefing

With ETC™ V7™, instructors and lab coordinators can watch up to 6 camera feeds at a time during simulations, annotating any mistakes in handling of controlled drugs to debrief with learners after. Many schools implement PTZ cameras installed from drug storage/inventory to at the bedside ADS to ensure proper drug handling is taking place at every step of the distribution process. ETC™ V7™ additionally allows for device group switching, thus creating a seamlessly recorded simulation from dispensing to administering.

Center Management

Simplicity™ 7, our feature-rich center management solution, includes a Scenarios module that grants instructors the ability to create and manage patient cases, actors, and scenarios from one central location. There are endless possible scenario opportunities to introduce various examples of drug diversion and the steps taken to address and prevent it.

Medication Dispensing

Our various medication dispensing products are designed to mimic measures put in place in real world settings to ensure patient and community safety. Each SimCabRx™ model includes an electronically locking drawer with individually locking pockets for storing high-risk drugs, while SimCartRx™ Standard & SimCartRx™ Elite include electronically locking drawers for bedside administration.

Each of those additionally, utilize MedsManager™, which requires barcode scanning verification for drawer access. MedsManager™ additionally tracks drug inventory and includes reports for drug discrepancies as well as requires a second person to verify higher-risk tasks like wasting of drugs.

Curriculum

Our curriculum, written by experts in their respective fields for both Nursing and Pharmacy Technician careers, addresses working with controlled and high-risk drugs as well as the technology utilized to access them. We recognize how busy instructor schedules become and strive to create curriculum for use of our products so they can focus on importance of educating learners on topics such as drug diversion.

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