Nurses Role In Drug Administration

Drug administration remains a traditional task of nurses which involves significant responsibility (Armitage & Knapman 2003, cited by Tang, Sheu, Yu, Wei & Chen, 2007) and should be given attention as such in order to reduce mistakes. Indeed, medication errors are even more common nowadays, since the numbers of medications available on the market for prescription increased. Additionally, technological advancements helped to increase the routes for medication, where nurses are provided with different pumps, tubes and valves which make nurses more susceptible to errors in drug administration (Tang et al.,2007) since different pump models have different settings and need different tubing. There are multiple contributing factors to medication error of which some may

The wide ranges of medications on the market provided have similar names, packaging and possibly come in more than one dose, thus, pharmacists and nurses have to take special care when giving treatment to wards and patients respectively, since these provide higher incidence of medication error. This is why double checking is very important even though sometimes both parties are restrained with time, workload and interruption. Nurses play a key role in the course of medication administration, and therefore they must be active in the avoidance of medication errors (Aiken et al., 2002, Benjamin 2002, cited by MRAYYAN et al., 2007).Although each and every hospital has policies and protocols these may still be violated due to a number of reasons, including interruption, distraction, disruption and many activities to take care of at the same time whilst administering medication. It is never over-emphasized to promote the importance of the 5 rights. The 5 rights are right drug, dose, patient, route and time of which can be easily neglected due