ipl-logo

Medication Errors Essay

1405 Words6 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Medication errors by nurses

Analyzing a Current Health Care Problem or Issue This essay examines medication errors’ sources, effects, and prevention measures. This paper seeks to raise awareness and knowledge of this critical patient safety issue by exploring the definition, key players, and root causes of medication errors. The information presented will help identify the elements, solutions, and implementation to reduce medication errors, increase medication administration procedures, and improve patient safety in healthcare environments. Standardization of medication practices through establishing protocols, guidelines, and naming conventions can minimize confusion and mitigate the risk of errors. Open communication and collaboration among healthcare professionals …show more content…

Here are some common aspects of medication errors: providers making mistakes in prescribing medications, resulting in incorrect dosages, inappropriate medications, or contraindicated medications. Dispensing errors involve pharmacists or technicians making mistakes in preparing and packaging medications, while administration errors involve administering medications incorrectly. Documentation errors involve inaccuracies or omissions in recording medication-related information while monitoring errors involve inadequate or improper monitoring of patients. Communication errors involve breakdowns in medication-related information exchange, leading to misunderstandings and incorrect medication use. It is essential to consider that medication errors can have adverse effects on patients, lengthen hospital stays, and raise healthcare expenses. To improve patient safety and prevent medication mistakes, healthcare systems, and providers consistently work to implement protections and preventive …show more content…

These errors, such as prescribing, transcription, dispensing, administration, and monitoring errors, lead to patient harm, increased costs, and a loss of trust. Preventing and addressing medication errors involves utilizing technology, implementing standardized practices, providing education, improving communication, and engaging patients. It requires collaboration among healthcare stakeholders to ensure safer medication practices and enhance patient safety. The impact of medication errors extends to different groups within the healthcare system. Patients bear the direct consequences, while healthcare professionals face professional and emotional challenges. Caregivers and family members are affected as they witness the aftermath and experience distress. Healthcare organizations deal with legal, financial, and reputational issues. The public becomes aware and advocates for improvements in patient safety. Nurses must acknowledge the significance of medication errors as they affect patient safety, professional accountability, legal outcomes, teamwork, and continuous healthcare improvement. Nurses play a crucial role in preventing medication errors and ensuring positive patient outcomes through vigilance, adherence to protocols, and promoting a safety culture. Understanding the specific settings and contexts where

Show More
Related
536 Words | 3 Pages

The prevention of medication errors is a process that should involve all staff in the emergency department. Yes, it is the registered nurse (RN) that administers the medication. However, patient safety is a concern in which all staff can assist. According to Kim and Bates (2013) medication errors represent one of the major concerns in patient safety. The process of medication administration first starts when the RN receives the order.

Read More
579 Words | 3 Pages

Six months after the introduction of medication aides, error rates were as follows: RN (2.75%), LPN (7.25%) and medication aides (6.06%) with a mean error rate of 6.6%” Randolph & Scott-Calwiezell (2010) as cited in Budden (2011). While errors remain, the objective of reducing inaccuracies among primary nursing staff was achieved by

Read More
681 Words | 3 Pages

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. Health information technology were developed to transform healthcare services, the way they are provided and compensated. Electronic prescribing (e-prescribing) becomes an internal part of that transformation process, which can be confirmed from annual Surescripts’ National Progress Report.

Read More
171 Words | 1 Pages

Reporting medication errors is beneficial to improve the learning process for nurses. The factors of workload, ineffective communication, and distraction all contribute to medication errors (Sears et al., 2013). Nurses often excuse the behavior of colleagues when a medication error occurs, or nurses will pass the buck to a senior nurse to report the medication error (Haw, Stubbs and Dickens, 2014). Implementing a no blame policy for reporting medication errors, and providing nurses with the knowledge and training to report medication errors will result in an increase of medication errors reported. References Haw, C., Stubbs, J. and Dickens, G. (2014).

Read More
1259 Words | 6 Pages

Recognizing, acknowledging, and understanding medication safety is important when administering medications. Understanding which medications are high-risk ones, being familiar with the medications being given, remembering the five most important rights when administering medications, communicating clearly, developing checking habits, and reporting the medication errors will lead to safe outcomes for the residents. However, errors do occur from a lack of experience, rushing, distractions, fatigue, doing too many things at once, not double checking, poor communication, and lack of team work. It is not only the staff that commit errors, but also the work environment that contributes to the medication error. Two examples are poor reporting systems

Read More
439 Words | 2 Pages

Our solution to medication errors is here, it is just a matter of implementing it into our

Read More
592 Words | 3 Pages

Effective communication is crucial in ensuring that patient care is coordinated and safe. This semester, I witnessed an incident where a patient's medication was missed because the communication between the physician and the nurse was unclear. The nurse assumed that the physician had ordered the medication, but the physician thought the nurse had already given it. This resulted in the patient not receiving the medication on time, which could have led to complications. This experience reinforced the importance of clear and effective communication among healthcare

Read More
795 Words | 4 Pages

The nursing staff needs to make sure they have more indicators towards practice nurse safety. Focusing on working patient safety down to zero with grade c medication ( Cockerham ,J.,Figueroa-Altmann,A., Foxen,C., Paffett,C., Sullivan,A.,&Wellner,J.,2014). The nurses making sure patient safety is first when administrating medication .The hospital would like to limit risk and increase reliability when taking care of patients. The purposed of this peer review article is to have the quality nursing and ample amount of nursing staff.

Read More
1497 Words | 6 Pages

To create an environment where these errors are a rare occurrence, all healthcare professionals must dedicate themselves to implementing QSEN's six core competencies each and every day. These professionals must also speak up when they see room for improvement in their workplace. Regardless of the healthcare setting or demographic of patients, safe outcomes are the purpose of providing patient-centered care. Since nurses are the largest subgroup of healthcare professionals, their ability to make strides towards improved medication administration is undeniable. As the nursing code of ethics states, nurses have the duty to protect the health and safety of those in their care (Winland-Brown, Lachman, O'Connor Swanson, 2015).

Read More
1174 Words | 5 Pages

It is believe that lack of access to policies and guidelines for administration of medication had resulted in poor information seeking habits which contributes to medication errors (O’Leary & Mhaolrunaigh,

Read More
1134 Words | 5 Pages

Medication error (ME) is defined as “improper dosage, delivery of an incorrect medication administration to wrong patient, and inappropriate medication therapy” (XU et al., 2014, p. 286). ME is a long threat standing threat and is common errors in health care setting. It outcome can lead to physically harmful, fatal and prolong hospitalization, and enormously costly. In the mental health setting, some of causes of ME are, similarities of generic and brand names of drug, similarities of container labels and packages, and illegible of handwriting prescription. In this paper, the issue of medication administration error related to sound-alike and look-alike medications will be examines and implement a policy and procedure to prevent this error

Read More
823 Words | 4 Pages

Deficiencies in communication between health professionals and recommendations for improvement are major findings in many health care quality improvement investigations with communication errors identified as the root cause of 70% of sentinel events in health care setting. Research also indicates that inadequate communication between health professionals and with health care consumers and/or family members is the primary issue in the majority of medication errors, adverse reactions, and near

Read More
908 Words | 4 Pages

Nurses are most involved in medication administration, shortly before any adverse drug events may emerge. They also have the unique role of detecting and preventing errors that occurred in the stages of prescribing, transcribing, and dispensing. Since adverse drug events most often occur in the prescription, transcription, and/or administration stages, promoting patient safety should have multi-factorial approaches that involve more than direct-care nursing staff. Also, human factors are the primary underlying cause of medication errors. Therefore, professional education and clinical in-services with individual and system focuses on patient safety issues are essential (Tzeng, Yin & Schneider,

Read More
1553 Words | 7 Pages

This resulted in 7% of the respondents reporting involvement in a medication error during that past year. Good interpersonal skills and effective communication ensures that concerns regarding patient safety can be brought up without seemingly challenging the knowledge of the other healthcare

Read More
461 Words | 2 Pages

Communication can be a big factor in medication errors. Miscommunication by the members of the healthcare team can lead to deadly consequences, so orders should be repeated back and verified (Anderson, 2010.) Sometimes

Read More

More about Medication Errors Essay

Open Document