Medicine carts - what is their role?

In a hospital setting, it is important to have secure, and quick way to access necessary medications either at prescribed intervals, or per special request. So it is important to be highly organized, and have tools to provide secure, yet highly structured access to required medications in a time-effective way. Even though emergency crash carts contain life-saving crash cart medications, they are not considered to be medicine carts, but form a separate category of crash carts. Likewise, even though medical treatment cards may contain applicable medications, they are not considered to be medicine carts.

An ergonomically well-designed medicine cart or medication cart or "med cart" can help accomplish both the security of the meds and quick and effective access to the medication by using a system of locking drawers, with drawer dividers, enclosed in a secure, yet mobile cabinet.

Ergonomy features of med carts

Some of the most important ergonomic features of medicine carts are well designed caster wheels with breaks, for quick maneuverability and secure lock-in into place, a handle for pulling the cart across the corridors to the patients, advanced security features such as magstripe entry access, or keyless access and auto-relocking after a cart has been at rest for a specified amount of time. Retractable writing surface is a must and will help with taking the notes on the job. A pass-through waste receptacle is helpful to remove used up unneeded items. High-end medicine carts will feature wireless access and remote control and accountability via a central PC.

Types of medicine carts

Powered electronic lockable medication carts: These are the medication carts for short term use where ad-hoc, at the moment's notice dispensing of the medications and narcotics is required. Such impromptu access, however does not preclude the lack of accountability, so acute care medicine carts feature the auto-locking security systems, and magstripe entry, as well as dual locking of narcotics. A display screen will show the power level of the built-in battery.

Long term medicine carts: These provide secure storage room for hundreds of punch cards. A punch card provides a schedule of medication taking which is customized on a patient-by-patient basis. These carts are sometimes called punch card carts. Besides punch cards, a long term medicine cart will contain drawers for necessary liquids and other supplies. It will have options for mounting a laptop computer, and to place in versatile medication separation bins. Because of the organization of medications into bins, such carts are called medication bin cards.

Unit dose medical carts: These have drawers designed to hold standard medication unit size of 3.25 in, and each drawer can hold several hundreds of unit size medication dose boxes.

Multi dose medical cart: Will hold larger dose boxes that accomodate several doses of medications.

Cassette medication carts: These will feature smaller size drawers ("cassettes") which have about 4 in width and will help, together with an effective labeling system, to separate different medications apart.

For brands and models of med carts, see subsection "Medicine carts" here: medication cart reviews.