Administering medication is a fundamental role in a nurse’s daily routine in the ward. This process happens at least twice daily and on average takes up to forty percentage of nurse’s time. It is also this skill that is higher risk, it is a step that is very susceptible to errors that can lead to consequences in patient safety. Medication governance has been put in place to prevent errors and promote patient safety. However, medication errors are still recurrent and persistent. This forty percentage of time is spent by nurses giving their time, concentration, and excellent communication for their patient. Each medication must be checked and administered accurately yet promptly. It is very hard for a nurse in stress-fuelled wards to spend just one hour on this job as they can be constantly interrupted throughout the process. Nurses must also remember that administration is the final step of a four-stage process of the medical. The four stages include other healthcare professionals in the “medication cycle”, they include the patient’s doctor, the pharmacist and finally the nurses. If the nurse’s errors with medication during administration, she/he is solely to blame however. Other professionals are equally at fault when a medication error occurs along the stages. The four stages involve the prescription, the transcription, dispensing and …show more content…
Patients who suffer long term illnesses have complicated regimes and medication errors can often occur with several drugs interacting with each other. Nurses must use professional judgement if certain medications are not suitable with each other as it could have adverse side effects. These adverse drug reactions could contribute to mortality and morbidity and can be determined by age, gender and the amount of drugs taken. Many patients are given medication that don’t correspond correctly with another drug they are