Accountability is important when administering medication to patients to ensure they receive proper care. Caregivers must properly audit and measure dosages, as failing to do so could have serious or life-threatening consequences for patients, and result in disciplinary or legal action against the caregiver. Various medical professionals, like doctors, pharmacists, nurses and care workers all share responsibility for safely handling drugs, due to the impact on patients' lives. Pharmacists and manufacturers also play roles to ensure drugs' safety by checking expiration dates and including instructions. Employees could face legal and disciplinary actions if irresponsibly administering drugs results in wrong or dangerous dosages for patients.

1. Sahra Mahamud
Unit 4: Record-Keeping and Audit Processes for Medication
Administration and Storage
Responsibility is the state or fact of having a duty to deal with something.
Accountability is the responsibility to someone or for some activity. It is important for
carer to be accountable when giving medication to patients so that they can receive
the best possible care they can. This can be done by ensuring the medicines are
audited and given to the patient with the right amount of dosage. If the person is not
accountable there could be serious or life threatening consequences for the patient.
Disciplinary and legal action will be taken out on the carer or administrator. Also the
organisation will fail to meet the care quality commission standards of the patients.
The employees that administer and store drugs are responsible because if they are
not responsible something serious or life-threatening could happen to the patient.
The different employees, such as doctors, pharmacists, nurses and care workers
involved are responsible because they are dealing with people’s life. The drugs given
to the patients are safe to use because of the roles the pharmacists and the
manufacturer play. The role of the pharmacists is the dispensing following receipt of
prescription, arrangements for repeat prescription, synchronised supply. It’s the
manufacturers’ job to store, check the expiry date, have patient information leaflet in
the packaging as the medication and to the side effects written on them. By doing
this it is ensured that the drugs given to the patients are safe.
Potential consequences for an employee to irresponsible administer drugs would be
to take legal and disciplinary action against the employee. The employee could have
administered the wrong drug to the patient and could face serious or life-threatening
consequences.