StaffCore · medication

eMAR software for care homes

An electronic medication administration record that will not colour in a dose nobody signed for. Used on every round at Raleigh House and Morton Gardens, the CQC registered homes we run ourselves.

What an eMAR is supposed to fix

A paper MAR chart has one flaw that no amount of care fixes: a blank box is silent. It might mean the resident refused, it might mean the round was interrupted, it might mean the medicine was given and the signature was missed. At two in the morning nobody can tell which, and by the time the chart is audited the shift that knows has gone home.

Most electronic systems inherit the same flaw in a smarter looking form. They show a tidy grid and a completion percentage, and a dose nobody recorded quietly becomes part of a green figure.

The rule StaffCore is built on. An unsigned dose is never drawn as given. The cell stays open, it stays the same size as the signed ones, and the round is not reported as complete. If the system cannot work out whether something was given, it says so rather than picking the reassuring answer.

What it covers

Scheduled roundsEach slot is its own record with the time it was due, who gave it and the outcome. A missed slot is visible as a missed slot.

PRN, as requiredAs required medicines are treated as as required. An empty time list on a PRN is correct, not an error, and it is never prompted as a routine dose.

Controlled drugsMarked as controlled, with the running balance and a second signature where your policy needs one.

Homely remediesParacetamol and cold remedies counted against a rolling 24 hour ceiling, across both the homely supply and anything prescribed, so the same ingredient cannot be doubled.

Stopping a medicineA discontinuation records the reason, the named person who decided, and where the instruction came from, including when a pharmacy relayed it.

Missed dose alertsRaised from the round itself and again by a scheduled check, so a tablet that is never opened still gets noticed.

When the wifi drops

Care homes have thick walls and bad corners. A carer mid round does not get to stop and wait for a signal.

The round keeps working. What was recorded is held on the tablet and sent when the connection returns.
If the database refuses a record when it eventually syncs, the record is kept, the failure is logged, and a red banner stays up until a person deals with it.
The pending count never quietly returns to zero, because a zero that means “we deleted it” reads exactly like a zero that means “it worked”.

Questions we get asked

Does it replace the pharmacy MAR?

It is the administration record. Your pharmacy still supplies and still produces their own chart. Medicines can be entered from the pharmacy list rather than typed from scratch, which is where most transcription errors come from.

What happens at an inspection?

Every administration carries who recorded it and when, including the ones the system raised itself, so an alert can always be traced back to what caused it. See what an inspector can be shown.

Can a carer edit yesterday?

Records are added to, not overwritten. A correction is a new entry that says who made it and why. Nothing in the care history is deleted.

See the medication round on a real shift What it costs →