Compliance Aids
As part of the great service many practices provide to their dispensing patients, MDS trays are often a vital tool used to ensure Compliance and Concordance with medications. The trays can be used as a great preventative to avoid unnecessary hospital admission. Before deciding whether to offer an MDS tray, patients should be assessed to see whether they would benefit, or whether an MDS tray would assist the carer and thus the patient in ensuring they are taking their medication safely.
Once a decision to offer the compliance aid has been made, then the frequency of supply needs to be considered. Depending upon clinical need, and the need to ensure that having multiple trays in the home at any one time does not lead to the patient using the medication trays like a pick and mix, it is often clinically appropriate to issue a weekly MDS tray. The decision to issue a weekly tray needs to be recorded in the patient’s clinical notes considering both the social circumstances, compliance issues as well as the preventative aspect of using MDS trays.
Some dispensing practices have stopped providing MDS trays in the mistaken belief that providing them is economically not viable.
If dispensaries provide weekly MDS trays, and on average each patient receiving these trays will have 4 items per tray, this equates to dispensing fees of over £8.00 per tray per week. Looking at the dispensary staff time taken to prepare and check a weekly tray of 4 items, it should take no longer than 15 minutes in total for each weekly tray. Therefore at least 4 weekly trays of an average of 4 items could be processed in an hour (many dispensers can safely process many more trays than this within that timescale). If the overall cost for an hour of dispenser time is a minimum of £20.00 (including on-costs, such as Employers National Insurance and Pension), then the dispensing fees will greatly exceed the staffing costs as well as the consumable costs.
The initial decision to provide compliance aids needs to be a clinical or social decision, and after that the economics of providing this great service to a vulnerable group of patients will ensure that you can combine both quality and profitability.
Omnicell Trays Available Through Two Convenient Ordering Methods
Dispex members are entitled to discounted prices!
