The healthcare industry continues to need qualified medical workers to fulfill thousands of vacancies across the country. In particular, medication assistants are needed to provide critical care to patients in hospitals, doctors' offices, and medical clinics.
When you want to fulfill one of these positions, you first need to undergo schooling to teach you the right set of skills. You can become a licensed assistant by completing vocational medication management training. Here are some things you can learn from this type of training program.
Learning Proper Doses
When you go through medication management training, you will learn how to give the proper doses of medicine to patients. As an MA, you will be expected to work with dozens of different medications each day. You need to know how to dose each one to keep your patients safe.
For example, if you work in a pediatric ward, you must know how to measure out doses for children and how to tell if a dose could be too much or too little for a pediatric patient. You also need to know how to draw out the right amount of medicine from the bottle or dispenser and make sure that it is the right quantity for the doctor's prescription.
How to Detect Side Effects
As a medication assistant, you also will learn how to recognize signs of possible complications in patients. Your medication management training may include lessons in how to tell if a patient is having an allergic reaction or not tolerating the medicine well.
You also may learn how to take vital signs immediately after giving a dose of medicine to a patient. You can report back to the doctor or charge nurse if a patient's heart rate, breathing, or alertness increases or subsides after he or she takes medicine.
Finally, your medication management training will afford you some knowledge of the most common classifications of medicines and for what purpose they are used. You can answer your patients' questions about what the medicines do and for what reasons they are given. You avoid having to defer questions to the charge nurse or doctor about why patients are being given certain medications.
Medication management training can help you fulfill vacancies in the healthcare industry. You can learn how to administer medicines safely and effectively to patients. You will know how to measure doses for patients of all ages. You can also monitor patients for side effects and answer their questions about their prescribed medications.
