Medications upgrade - 4 great new features

Four (4) great new features in the Medications module that improve record keeping and knowledge sharing in the most popular and important extension module in Reach. The new featured pushed live in Jan 2022 are;

  • Location awareness in the scheduled medications table

  • Notes required for Paused medications

  • As Required medication frequency

  • Nil administered and Student refused states for medication records


Location awareness in scheduled medications

The scheduled medications table now shows a location icon which will fetch details of the current location of a student.

If students who have gone on leave without their medications being paused or if students have late medications in the scheduled medications table it is useful to be able to quickly reference if that student is on leave.


Notes required for Paused medication

An upgrade to the Pause function in scheduled prescription medications means that whenever a staff member is pausing a medication the reason for the pause will recorded. The pause submission will also create a pastoral record in the medical history of the student’s profile.

In addition, the Pause & Expire function is supported with a new security permission in Reach Accessibility settings. Schools can now control which users have permission to Pause or Expire a prescribed medication.


“As Required” Medication frequency

A new frequency is available for prescription medications that allow you to set a frequency to “As Required”. When set to As Required the handling of the prescription medications will change and behave more like an over the counter medication.

  • When selecting As Required you are not required to set a time for the frequency

  • As Required prescription medications will not display in the scheduled medications table of the daily dispensary screen

  • Administering As Required medications is similar to administering over the counter medications

  • Select the blue “Add as Required” medication button

  • Select the student name

  • In the student’s profile of you will see the list of any As Required prescription medications that the student has been allocated and any over the counter medications that the student is permitted to take.


Nil administered and Student refused states for records

We have improved how you record Nil quantities administered and situations when medications are refused by students by including a “successfully administered” state of medications being administered.

New field – Was the medication dispensed successfully?

A new field is added to the table when administering scheduled prescription medications that identifies is a medication was administered successfully.

The default state of this field is “Medication was dispensed successfully” and there is no change to the procedure for medications that are successfully administered.

For medications that are not administered by staff (ie: zero administered) or where students refuse to take the schedule medication a record can be submitted to reflect the accurate status of the scheduled medication.

Set the quantity to Zero and select the appropriate status from the drop down selector and write an appropriate note in the notes field to record the situation.