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Medication exceptions

This page is for coordinators, registered managers and owners. It covers what counts as an exception, what each column means, and how the early and late judgements are made.

“Medication exceptions” is described as “Doses on delivered visits that were not recorded, not given, or given outside their window.”

Three rules decide what appears:

  • Delivered visits only. Someone checked in. A visit nobody attended is a missed visit, not a missed dose, and belongs on the Quality report.
  • Scheduled medicines only. A medicine set up as “As needed (PRN)” has no scheduled dose to miss, so it never appears.
  • Published visits only.

The presets are “Last 7 days”, “Last 4 weeks”, “This month” and “Custom”. It opens on “Last 7 days”. “Custom” reveals “From” and “To”. The dates covered are printed under the heading, and the period never runs past today.

The card’s description carries the totals for the period, in the form “3 missed · 2 not given · 1 early · 4 late”.

Column What it means
“When” The visit’s date and start time. It opens the visit.
“Client” The person. It opens their record on the “Medication” tab.
“Medication” The medicine as it is written on the client’s list.
“What happened” One of the four kinds below, and for a dose that was not given, the outcome as well.
“Note” What the support worker wrote at the time.
Kind What it means
Not recorded The medicine was on the client’s list, someone attended, and no answer was recorded at all. The dose nobody touched. Shown in red.
Not given An answer of “Refused”, “Unavailable” or “Withheld”, with the worker’s note. Shown in red.
Given early Given, but before the medicine’s window opened. Shown in amber.
Given late Given, but after the medicine’s window closed. Shown in amber.

“Not recorded” is the one to chase first. There is no note to read, because nothing was recorded.

Early and late are measured against “Window from” and “Window to” on the medicine, which a coordinator sets by editing it on the client’s record. With no window set, a dose is never judged early or late.

Two details matter:

  • The moment compared is when the dose was first recorded, not when it was last corrected. Editing a note later does not make a punctual dose read as late.
  • A window on an overnight visit that falls at or before the visit’s start belongs to the next day, and a window whose end is before its start crosses midnight. Both are handled, so a dose is not wrongly flagged.
  • The search box matches the client, the medicine, the note and the outcome.
  • The kind box narrows to one of “Not recorded”, “Not given”, “Given early” or “Given late”, or “All kinds”.

When nothing matches the period, the card says “Every scheduled dose in this period was recorded and in its window.”

“Export CSV” writes the rows on screen with these columns:

date, starts_at, client, medication, kind, status, note

The file name carries the dates of the period.

Coordinators do not have to come here to notice a problem. Each morning the platform emails them yesterday’s counts and raises an alert row called “Medication exceptions yesterday”. A dose recorded as not given reaches them straight away as its own alert. See Alerts.