Care Management System · eMAR
The medicines round, and the record it leaves behind
Medicines are the most-examined part of CQC’s Safe key question. FlexiEle gives UK care homes a full electronic medication administration record (eMAR) — every dose recorded where it happens, given, refused or omitted, each with a reason and a signature, on an append-only record you can hand to an inspector.
What should be given, and what actually was
Each resident holds a medicines list — drug, form, strength, dose, route, schedule, prescriber and review date — and that list is the spine the whole round is computed from. Special-administration flags live on the record itself, so the carer sees them before they see the button.
- Controlled drug
- Covert administration
- Nurse only
- Homely remedy
- PRN / as required
- Topical & insulin
A discontinued medicine stays on the record rather than disappearing — the history of what someone was prescribed is part of the evidence, not clutter to be tidied away.
The round, grouped by resident
Due doses are worked out per day and laid out by time slot, with allergies surfaced at the top of each resident and a running count of what’s left to do. It runs on a laptop or trolley for the round, and on a phone at the bedside.
The same round, at the bedside
On a phone it’s the same record, not a cut-down version — the allergies, the due times, the flags and the same Give and Not-given actions, scoped to the resident the carer is standing next to. Reached in one tap from that resident’s timeline, or from the due-count on their card on the shift screen.
Which matters because the alternative is a carer holding five doses in their head until they reach the office. Point-of-care recording isn’t a convenience — it’s the difference between a contemporaneous record and a reconstruction.
Checks where they actually help — at the moment of giving
The safeguards sit in the give action, not in a policy document. A dose that isn’t given demands a reason code. A controlled drug asks for a witness. An as-required medicine is checked against its own minimum interval and 24-hour maximum, and a carer who needs to override says so on the record.
- Refusals and omissions are captured with a reason — the thing CQC asks for most often and paper MAR charts record worst.
- A suspected medication error can be raised as an incident from the same screen, routed to the manager’s queue.
- Homely remedies are annotated as such, with the dose given and why — the six things a homely-remedy entry has to state.
What this is not
The allergy check matches the medicine name against the allergies recorded on the resident and advises the carer to look. It is not a clinical interaction check — that needs coded drug data and a licensed clinical knowledge base, and it belongs upstream with the prescriber and the dispensing pharmacy. We tell the carer what the prompt is worth so they use their own judgement, rather than dressing a name match up as clinical safety.
A MAR chart an inspector already knows how to read
The record renders as the chart the sector uses — medicines down the side, days across the top, a tick for given and the omission code letter for anything not given. As-required medicines list their actual events with the reason each was given, and a homely remedy is annotated on the same sheet as everything else, with the legend to explain it.
A controlled-drugs register that behaves like the bound book
An electronic CD register is explicitly permitted, provided entries are attributable, unalterable, auditable and printable. Ours is append-only: nothing is edited and nothing is deleted. A correction is a new entry that reverses the original and says why, and the original stays visible — which is the whole point of a register.
- Schedule 2 only — the register is a Schedule 2 instrument, so Schedule 3–5 drugs stay off it rather than padding a legal record they don’t belong in.
- A running balance on every line, re-derived from the signed quantities so a figure that has drifted is shown rather than trusted.
- Doses given against stock that was never booked in show as unaccounted, loudly — the honest signal, instead of a tidy balance that hides it.
- Destruction demands a witness, including an authorised witness who isn’t an employee.
- Built to print, because the regulations expect a register you can put in front of someone.
Stock, without the busywork
Ordinary medicines carry a stock balance that decrements as doses are given, with days of supply worked out from the dose and frequency — so the answer to “what do I order” is a list, not a stock-take. Tracking is opt-in per medicine, because homes track what’s costly or critical rather than every paracetamol, and a medicine with no units-per-dose set reads as not tracked rather than being guessed at.
The manager sees the gaps, not just the doses
A read-only audit across every administration in the home, filtered by resident, date or outcome, with the omission rate on the front. The number that matters is not how many doses were given — it’s how many weren’t, and whether anyone wrote down why.
Into the Reg 17 trail
Medication events join the same audit log as the rest of the care record, so governance review is one place, not several.
Into the evidence pack
The MAR item on your CQC readiness dashboard turns green off real administrations — no separate evidence-gathering exercise.
Into the incident register
A medication error raised at the bedside lands in the manager’s queue and the safeguarding register with the dose attached.
An eMAR earns its place by making the missing dose visible, not by making the chart look full. Everything here is append-only, every gap is attributable, and where the system can’t be certain it says so rather than guessing on your behalf.
See it on your floor
Book a walkthrough with your care setting in mind — we’ll show capture, oversight and the evidence trail end to end.
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