The Medication Cycle

We will be looking at the roles of three people involved in the medication cycle starting with the doctor, then moving onto the Pharmacist and then onto the Enrolled nurse. The doctor’s role is to look at all the symptoms, medically diagnose the patient and to analysis their medication needs (Berman, Kozier & Erb, 2015). The doctor then writes the order or script of medications for the patient which needs to be taken to the pharmacy where the Pharmacist will make up the prescription and dispense the medication the pharmacist may also give information about drug interactions and side effects just to name a few. The Pharmacist is a licensed and trained person who has studied Pharmacology the study of how drugs effect living organisms (Berman,

In the team factor where the drug was not documented and there was a possible medication error waiting for the next shift there could be re-education strategies on the importance of correct documentation ("Importance of Documentation in Nursing: The Do’s and Don’ts", 2012) and incorporating or making sure that there is a verbal recap of the drugs administered are all disclosed during handover (Berman, Kozier & Erb, n.d.). With the task factor of making sure you complete your rights ensuring that the right dose, route and medication is being administered to the right patient, if this step has been missed or forgotten re-training could also be beneficial in this instance (Nurse In Australia, 2014), as well as having your third check regardless of drug always checked with another superior nurse until it has been demonstrated that the appropriate checks are being carried out autonomously (Nurse In

The MIMs identifies it is used in ‘oedema, hepatic cirrhosis, renal disease, including nephrotic syndrome and hypertension in adults’. It is available in tablet form, oral solution as well as a solution for injection. The usual dose for adults with oedema in the oral tablets and solution is twenty to eighty milligrams once a day with the ability to increase the dose after six to eight hours by twenty to forty milligrams with the usual maximum dose being four hundred milligrams per day (MIMS REFERENCE). When used as a solution for injection in adults with oedema the usual dose is twenty to forty milligrams with the ability to increase by twenty milligrams administered once or twice a day (MIMS REFERENCE).

As blood flows through our kidneys, the kidneys filter the fluid, take what we don’t need and turn it into urine and reabsorbs what we do need back into our system. Loop diuretics work by stopping the reuptake of fluid in the loop of Henle (Bullock & Manias, 2011). The sodium-potassium-chloride cotransporter within the loop would usually reabsorb twenty-five percent of the sodium back into our bodies (Klabunde, 2012). When you take a loop diuretic you stop this sodium reabsorption, leading to the body needing to get rid of this excess fluid though increased diuresis (Bullock & Manias,