Medication Errors In Health Care

MEDICATION ERROR:
"A medication error is any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm while the medication is in the control of the health care professional, patient, or consumer.(7)
Medication errors are known, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), which account for approximately 1,000,000 medical errors per year. Those of which, approximately 10% have been resulted a death.
Medication Administration Errors (MAE's) is defined as 'any occurring deviation by the physician's medication order as written for patient's medication order chart' it has been broadened to 'mistakes associated with drugs and intravenous solutions which are made during prescribing it, transcription,

Historically, nurses have bear the burden of 'being seen as incompetent and in need of remedial assistance.' (2)This attribution of nurses has been owed to errors in the route of administration, i.e. 'entered formulas administered parenterally, oral medications administered intrathecally, IM injectibles administered via I.V', etc. (4) These MAE's account for 38% of the reported medication errors, while errors at the ordering phase account for 39% of medication errors.(2) Because the systems associated with reporting MAE's are viewed as inflicting, so many clinicians don't report errors, which do little to eliminate these errors from occurring again. It is important to implement systems that are used as non-inflicting educational tools as they are better received in the practicing

These factors include characteristics of individual providers (e.g., training, fatigue levels), the nature of the clinical work (e.g., need for attention to detail, time pressures), equipment and technology interfaces (e.g., confusing or straight-forward to operate), the design of the physical environment (e.g., designing rooms to reduce spread of infection and patient falls), and even macro-level factors external to the institution (e.g., evidence base for safe practices, public awareness of patient safety concerns).There were 10 studies that assessed the association of human factors with MAEs. Four major themes emerged in the review: fatigue, cognitive abilities, experience, and skills.