Medication Error

Overview
According to the Food and Drug Administration, medication error is a failure in the treatment process that occurs very often and posts a threat to patients. It is clearly frequent and is often avoidable but puts risk to patients. As stated in a report of the Institute of Medicine, there is a 1.5 million cases of occurrence of medication error in the United States every year (Westbrook, J.I., Woods, A., Rob, M.I., Dunsmuir, W.T., Day, R.O. (2010). ). This high incidence of medication error should be our primary focus because medication administration has a very big role and is an important part of the nurse’s role. Studies have also shown that interruptions to nurses during administration of medications have been a big factor to an

First will be to do the person approach in which the errors and lapses are being made by the individual doing the procedure. The second approach is the system approach, where-in environment and the conditions in which a person works in plays a factor in it. For we cannot change the condition where human plays a big role, we will be needing to work in the system approach where we will prevent or at the least minimize the disturbances in the surroundings of the caregiver doing the procedure. Studies have shown that this disruptions and interruptions doesn’t solely affect the chance of having an medication error but it also increases the time of completion of the task. With this, researchers tried to examine the effect on the rates of procedural failures. Several studies have shown a result of increase in the risk of medication error from 2.3% which has no interruptions to 4.7% with interruptions. The data gathered imply that although errors can occur without interruptions, you will most likely decrease the chance of error if you reduce interruptions during the procedure. ( cited in Susan M. Hohenhaus, MA, RN, FAEN and Stephen M. Powell, MS (2008 )

This figure is reported from several small studies and compared to the report of the U.S Pharmacopeia which relied on the data provided to that institution for 1999. Also, according to Landmark 2006 report “ Preventing Medication Errors “ these errors injure 1.5 million Americans each year and losts 3.5 billion in wages and additional medical expenses. As for the Philippines, there is no actual number on the number of cases because of the lack of statistical data from studies conducted here, this study utilized studies from the US to further explain the case. Considering the large number of incidence due to this issue in the US, we can say that there will be more cases of which in the Philippines because of the technological difference and the lag in the nursing care system in the Philippines. This numbers brought awareness to me that we nurses as researchers need to find ways to reduce the rate of incidence of medication errors which greatly affects the safety of our clients. The nurses main role is to promote safety and healing of the patient. Florence Nightingale stated in her book entitled “Notes on Hospitals published in 1859, “ the very first requirement in a hospital is that sit should do the sick no harm”. The sterile cockpit technique is now being integrated to the field of medicine for it can greatly reduce the number of errors present in our current situation by eliminating interruptions