31.1 Adding medications to Reach

The first step in preparing to administer medications in Reach is ensure that add all of the medicines you will administer to your Register of Medications. This is a table that lists all of the medications that are available in your Reach portal for students to take. 

All medicines need to be added to the Medicines Register before they can be administered to students.

Once they are added to your Medicines Register they are then available to be assigned to students for prescription medications (PMO) or, in the case of Over the Counter medications (OTC), permission can be granted to the student to take the OTC. 

 Every medications that is added to your medications register will have some basic and common information that is used to control how it functions is the medications module.  These data components are

1.   Which type of medicine the medication is

   1. Prescription medications are referred to as PMO medications

   2. Over the Counter medications are referred to as OTC medications

2.   Which category the medication belongs to

   1. You can control the categories of medication that you make available in your System Configuration > Lookups settings.

Where to find it: Go to System Configuration > Medications

Medication Types

There are two Types of medications that you can create in the Medications manager module:

PMO - Prescription Medication Only 

Prescription medications (PMO) are medicines which are prescribed as medical treatment for a student. In most instances these will be unique to each student.

The unique prescription details for each medicine relating to an individual student's dosage and frequency of administering the medication is allocated to to a student in the individual student's profile (found in the Medications Tab of the student's Medical Profile).  

OTC - Over the Counter Medications

Over-the-counter (OTC) medicines are non-prescription medicines that you can purchase and administer without a prescription.

OTC medications are safe and effective when you follow the directions on the label and as directed by health care professionals. Whereas PMO medications are allocated to individual students, OTC medications are available for all students however each individual student's access to the available OTCs requires a permission in the student's profile for each individual OTC.  Parents and Staff have the ability to set the student's permission for OTC medications which is found in the Medications Tab of a student's Medical Profile.

Medication Categories

Within each Type of medicine, you may also create Categories of medicines.

Categories allow you to maintain collections of similar medicines into a group which can then form part of your permissions structure for staff access, for administering medications or for parents to permit or prohibit students to take.

Example 1
Antihistamines may be set as a category for OTC medications. Multiple items or medicines can then be added to your medications register and added to the OTC-Antihistamine category. Your school may then enable parents to permit or prohibit their child from receiving medicines in this category or you provide staff with (or deny them from) permission to administer this category of medicine.

Example 2
Schedule 8 medications in Australia are controlled drugs/medicines and many schools will limit who can administer this category of medicine to only senior staff.  Using categories we can isolate these medicines and ensure only specific staff have permission to administer these medicines.

How to create or edit Categories of Medicine

Creating your medicine categories is part of your initial system configuration. 

By default your REACH Medications module will have a number of preset categories for your PMO and OTC medicine types. These can be edited in your System Configuration > Lookups section.

When medication categories exist they can then be used to control which medication categories each staff member is permitted to administer.

Create new medications

You can create, edit and delete medications in your medication register.

Clicking on the New Medication button or clicking on an existing medication in your medication register will open the Medication Details form. Here you can add all of the relevant details of the medication including notes that are relevant for dosage and warnings for application.

Go to System Configuration > Medications

You need to create the following details for each medicine;

1. Label (text field)

2. Medicine Type (select field)

3. Category (select field)

4. Manufacturer (text field)

5. Unit Amount (text field)

6. Unit Type (select field)

7. Medicine Type (select field)

8. Notes (text field)

9. Contraindications