There a a lot of little tricks that make it go faster. However, you will have to see what works for you. Myself, I found that frequently used vitamins/colace for example you can pour several in a med cup or keep those on top of cart as you go down the hall depending on your patients. cant do that with confused/dementia patients. but a med cup full of vit C just in the lip of the cart, saves opening bottle 30 times in a med pass and those few seconds/minutes add up. I flip my MAR every other page of meds to be given, this reduces the pages I have to look through as I am doing my med pass. A lot of it is just learning the patients and their meds and that just plain takes time. I have been running a med cart for a year and a half now and it has gotten quicker but since I float from hall to hall it takes me a little longer on halls I haven't floated to lately. I have up to 42 patients @ any given time and they have meds through out the shift. I also float from shift to shift. You will get more efficient. Somethings you will figure out work for yourself.

Best of luck and keep your head up! LTC med passes are notoriously difficult. Rn's in our facility don't even run a med cart, our LPNs run the med carts and Rns do MDS and supervise. It has taken 3 Rns to try to run a cart before, due to lack of experience with them. So you must be doing pretty well. How long did you train? We usually have at least a month of training along side more experienced nurses.