Haw, C., Stubbs, J. and Dickens, G. (2014). Barriers to the reporting of medication administration errors and near misses: an interview
In conclusion, in all healthcare settings medical errors occur but it doesn’t only effect the person responsible: all members of the healthcare team are affected. Pharmacy technicians are also capable of identifying any potential or actual errors and report it before the medication is distributed. Since patient safety is universal among all other healthcare practitioners is it important for them to advocate a safe and healing environment for patient
The nursing profession entails many responsibilities that range from providing emotional support to administering medications that could result in death for those receiving care. Approximately 40% of a nurse's day consists of passing medication, a duty that sets their level of liability above many other healthcare professions (McCuistion, Vuljoin-DiMaggio, Winton, Yeager, & Kee, 2018). Despite today's advances in technology and nursing education, the frequency of medication errors is still staggering. To ensure that the benefits of nursing outweigh the risks, nurses look to the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) six core competencies for guidance. These competencies include quality improvement, safety, informatics, teamwork and collaboration, evidence-based practice, and patient-centered care (Cronenwett et al., 2007). Each competency has its own knowledge, skills, and attitudes that when applied to medication administration, help warrant the best results.
In the world today registered nurses are expected to know about the drugs they administer, their indications, contradictions and adverse effects and correct doses. Any RN can rattle off the correct procedure for safe drug administration. Although, despite this knowledge the incidence of drug errors remain high (Tindale, 2007). A common drug error that occurs is between Amphetamine, which is a CNS stimulant and Propranolol, which is a beta blocker.
Staff work with the same residents day after day, and the CMs know what the residents take for medications every day. An intervention for preventing the medication error from happing again is implementing a better system in which the medications are administered. First, the medication administration record (MAR), could become computerized. This way it makes it difficult for the CM to sign off all the medications at once for the residents when setting them up. This would alert the nurse that all the residents were getting their medication at the same time, which is impossible. Secondly, the way the resident receives his medications should consist of the CM stating what each of the medications are so the resident is aware what he is taking. By implementing this, the CM can do the final check of administering the medications. If the medications themselves could be barcoded and scanned in before popping the medication in the medication cup, this would help the CM double check the five rights as well. A bar-code electronic medical administration record (eMAR) technology associates several technologies into the medication administration process to provide the correct medication, dose, time, route, and patient. This technology will provide an additional check and implement safety (Poon et al., 2010). If the wrong medication is
Yvonne, your post was extremely intriguing to me as a community health department is not an environment I have had the privilege of experiencing. Interestingly, the utilization of computerized order entry does not prevent the prescriber from ordering an incorrect medication dose or the wrong drug (Lapane, Waring, Dube’, & Schneider, 2011). Do the facility employ process to assure nurses are checking the medication in order to avoid the administration of an incorrect drug or dosage?
Preventable medical mistakes cause approximately 200,000 deaths around the United States each year. (1) More than 1,000,000 Americans are negatively impacted by medication errors each year caused by inadvertent mistakes in the prescription filling process. With 4 out of 5 adults taking at least 1 medication daily and 1 out of 4 adults taking 5 or more medications daily nationwide, errors like these cost healthcare industry billions of dollars per year.
Technological advances have improved patient safety and quality of care. E-prescribing is a technological development that can contribute to patient safety by reducing prescribing errors. The Food and Drug Administration receives about 300 medication errors a month. This number can be reduced if all health care settings are adopters of e-prescribing. Our solution to medication errors is here, it is just a matter of implementing it into our
Technology is a massive part of our society today and it is continuously changing. It can help solve issues and increase sufficiency. One safety issue that technology can help improve is medication administration errors that occur in hospitals and other health care settings. A medication administration error is defined as any preventable event that could possibly result in unsuitable medication use or harm to the patient while the health care professional is in control of the medication. The most common type of medical error is medication errors. Medication administration errors happen when the seven rights of medication administration are not checked; these include the right patient, the right drug, the right dose, the right time, the
In a report by the Institute of Medicine (2006), Titled, Preventing Medication Errors, “The committee concludes that there are at least 1.5 million preventable adverse drug events (ADE’s) that occur in the United States each year.” These numbers are astonishing given the number of adults that are taking prescription medications daily. Most of the errors occur during the prescribing and administering steps and during an average hospital stay, a patient can expect to have one medication error occur every day (Institute of Medicine, 2006).
Before administering the medication, they must use pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic principles to understand the onset, peak, and duration of medication effects. This helps them to anticipate and counteract any adverse reactions and encourages timely medication administration (Durham, 2015). They must also be familiar with nursing implications such as the use of the 5 rights of medication administration. These rights ensure that the right patient is receiving the right dose of the right medication at the right time using the right route (Catalano, 2015, p.447). Although the rights are regarded as a basic standard for safe medication practice, nurses make administration errors despite having verified the five rights. The application of the rights, as well as a conducive environment without unnecessary of distraction and adequate knowledge of medication administration practices, improves medication safety (Choo, Hutchinson, & Bucknall,
With increasing the acceptance of using e-prescribing in health care , evaluating and understanding the types of e-prescribing errors can help to identify the prober ways to prevent future e-prescription errors from reaching patients. It is also important to use health information technology to improve safety, such as use of technology to identify and monitor patient safety events, risks and hazards ;and to intervene before actual harm occurs
Giving medication in the Emergency Department in theory should be just like any other department. The difference in medication administration in the Emergency Department from others is the environment. Medication errors can be caused from a number of things, omission, time delay, wrong dose, wrong route, etc. The problem in the Emergency Department with medication errors is nurse distractions during the medication process. According to the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, (2012) nurses are distracted or interrupted four times during a single medication administration. Distractions and interruptions affect the nurses memory.
Nurses are one of the most important people in the healthcare system. They handle just about everything that involves direct client care. They are also in charge of administering medication to clients under the order of the doctor or nurse practitioner. Sadly, the number of incidences involving medication errors are quite high. In this paper, I will talk about the numerous ways medication errors can occur and how nurses have a great role preventing them, in order to keep all clients in the healthcare system safe.