Could a single solution save nurses dozens of hours each month, reduce medication errors and cut waste?
That’s the question a German health panel is asking about blister packs, the perforated packets into which residents’ prescribed medications are sealed for use at specific times.
The Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care announced last week it has designed a study intended to determine whether such patient-specific packaging can be as helpful as predicted in skilled nursing settings.
Not every medication can be blister packed.
But by one previous estimate, even if two-thirds of all German nursing home patients switched to blister-packed drugs, nursing staff would save 22 to 51 minutes per month, per resident. That translates to as many as 86 nursing hours monthly in a 100-bed facility.
While blister packaging is provided as a service by many American long-term care pharmacies, it’s unclear how much they improve patient care and staff efficiency. According to the working group, no study has investigated their use in long-term geriatric settings.
“The discrepancy between the broad and sometimes vehement debate about blister packaging on the one hand and the lack of evidence on the other surprised us,” said Thomas Kaiser, head of the group’s Drug Assessment Department. His group issued its study design as part of a larger report on the issue and has called on researchers to finally produce more robust data.
