Drug Education News

Children Now have a story about new guidance produced by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain about handling medicines in social care settings.

According to the new guidance, special residential schools and boarding schools should consider storing medicine young people need on a regular basis and help them to take their medicine.

In childcare and early education settings, the medication policy should include getting written consent from parents to dispense medication to a child, which medicines a worker can give once they are trained and what supervision there should be if the child takes their own medicine.

For children in foster care, the guidance says handling medicine will not differ from normal households, but carers should store medicine properly, support children taking their own medication and be given full information about when and how they should give it.

The guidance itself can be downloaded here.  Unfortunately the guidance, it seems to me, misses a trick in failing to remind social care settings of the need to deliver drug education to the children and young people in their care.

Perhaps it ought to be read in conjunction with the NCB/Drug Education Forum booklet Talking about Alcohol and Other Drugs and DrugScope’s Ritalin (Methylphenidate) in Schools.

The Society’s press release is here.