At work this weekend one of the CNA's is working at a nursing home where she is a Med Tech.  She took an 8 hour course to pass meds and now gives medication to 25 residents.  She is also incharge of the dining room for the 25 residents and getting them ready to bed.  I was somewhat shock to know that she has to give meds on so many people.  Can this be legal? She really doesnt have a lot of knowledge about meds at this point and I worry about her and med errors. What do you all think?

Nursing homes in general try to spend as little as possible on actual health care for their residents. From what I have seen, nursing homes should not be allowed to have any hand in anything related to health care. Let the nursing home owners maintain the facilities and basically collect rent. Outsource the nursing care to a disinterested 3rd party. What passes for medical care in nursing homes now is a shame. People work hard their whole life, to end up in the Grim Reaper's waiting room. Think about it - does anybody have any kind of a positive outlook on the prospect of ending up in a nursing home?

Nursing homes just want task-oriented people. Even a great R.N. gets overwhelmed at the amount of meds on a typical med pass, and the focus is on getting the meds passed, not the clinical picture of the person taking the meds. Guess nursing homes have figured out that it is cheaper to get some random person to pass meds. As regulated as nurses are, how can the nursing homes get away with this? The nursing homes cover up a lot, that's how. Med errors get washed away in a hurry. I was visiting a nursing home, and questioned a MedTech about a roxanol dose (I didn't tell them I am a nurse). I could see that it was 20 cc's in the med cup. She insisted it was correct. I could not just sit and watch somebody give that much roxanol and believe it to be right, so I asked for the nursing supervisor. The supervisor came and administered the right dose of 20 mg, or 2 cc's.  So how often does that happen?

Write to your congress person, write to the board of nursing, write to whoever you can think of to get things changed.

I am a Nurse tech in a nursing home in WI and they are very good.  It is in a small community and has a good reputation for providing quality care to the residents.  We have 2 nurses on each floor  and have the responsibility of taking care of about 17 residents per nurse with 2 CNA's helping us.  The specific nursing home I am talking about does not have the same ratio of staff to residents and is allowing this Med tech to take on too much responsibility than what she has been trained for.  Money is an issue with both of the nursing homes as funding through Medicare and Medicaid seems to get cut lower each year.  It is sad that our society does not come together and demand better healthcare for its people.

Here in Nevada, the training is 8 hours as well, and I too feel that this is not enough training to be a med tech. When I approached the company doing the training about giving more hours to train them, I was informed that it is up to the facility to continue with the training of the med tech.  I guess they have a point in that the facility should continue providing additional hours to that tech and allowing the tech to have a mentor and be followed for maybe a week or two with the nurse, thus promoting safety for the residents. I feel also that there were some misconceptions at the facility where I had previously worked. The lead med tech enforced the idea that a med tech is not required to know what a medication was for, that they only needed to pass the medication out and be done with it and redirect the resident to the nurse if they had any questions about their meds. I disagreed with that philosophy as I believe that anybody passing out medications should know what the pills are that they are giving out and know the side effects of the medications as well.

Was I asking too much??

Like I mentioned, they need more training after their initial med tech class, and I do feel that we as nurses should assist them to be safer med techs. The knowledge we have can be passed along to them on proper medication administration. I know we all are busy, but I believe that if we assist them and teach them more, then in the long run our job load cleaning up their messes will subside. Following them on a med pass for a week or so WILL help them to become better techs! Either one takes the time to help, or spend the rest of your days cleaning up their messes.