Bar Code Medication Administration Procedure

It’s not simply the particular giving of the medications that fare up all the time. It is checking the medical record with the hand written prescriptions, grouping the varied medications and also the instrumentation for giving them, and ensuring all the patients safety measure are covered.

In Australian hospitals medication administration errors make up 9% or 1 in10 of all medication administrations. These errors include wrong doses, wrong intravenous infusion rates and errors made by prescribing doctors. Errors on discharge of patients were increasingly higher with up to 2 errors per patient related to doctors transcribing discharge medications (Roughead, Semple, & Rosenfeld, 2016).

Improved patient safety is the most essential advantage of the BCMA system. “On average a hospital patient is subjected to at least one medication error per day (IOM, 2006)”(Foote). BCMA significantly reduces medication errors that cause a compromise in patient safety. The BCMA verifies the five rights of medication administration before a patient receives a medication by the software alerting the nurse if there is a contraindication between the medicine scanned and the patient’s orders. A pilot study conducted at a 300-bed community hospital found that the BCMA system reduced medication errors by 80% (Foote). Fowler et al states that “decrease in errors related to the wrong patient was a direct result of the bar code system (Fowler).”

According to Rosseter (2011), one of the largest segments of the US workforce are comprised of Registered Nurses, with over three million registered nurses worldwide. Due to the fast paced and rising complex demands placed on our healthcare environment, it is no surprise that over twenty-four thousand post graduate students were actively seeking and earning their master’s degree in nursing in 2011 (DHHS, 2013, p.ix). In order to gain an understanding of the interplay among my education, career path and opportunities afforded to me by taking an approach to higher degree learning. I approached a co-worker whose capabilities impressed me and asked her five questions in person, in order to gain her insightful information of what I will be facing during these next few months.

* Reduction of medication errors- Barcode medication administration safeguards against wrong pt/wrong med/wrong dose errors and alerts to potential medication interactions (Goth, 2006).

This article will look at two articles and focus on aspects of safety medication administration in nursing practice by the staff nurses. This is interesting area because the previous report on the medication administration error in the UK shows that approximately 5.6% of doses administered to adult hospital patients and it has been estimated that 0.6-1.2% of medication administration errors may lead to severe harm even death (Mcleod et al, 2013). Leape et al (1995) indicated that nurses were responsible for 86% of all medication error interception, regardless of the original errors. The nurses play the important role in identifying the causes of medication errors and preventing medication administration errors in nursing practice in order to provide safe care toward the service users (Henneman et al, 2010). The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA 2004) documented that the health professionals need to effectively and safely use medicines to ensure patients get the maximum benefit from the medicine; meanwhile minimizing the potential harm. This article will be critiqued on the different types of evidence which explored safety medication administration in the nursing practice toward service user. Using evidence is important in nursing practice because it can help nurses in addressing questions related to best possible care and improve patients’ outcome. It is embedded within the code the nurses are expected to use best possible evidence in the nursing

The pharmacy, nursing, and informatics department were required to be involved in implementing the bar-code-assisted medication administration (BCMA) patient safety initiative. The involvement of the informatics department was required for planning and coordination of the electronic medication administration record and the scanning devices. The nurses were administering the medications so they were required to undergo training on BCMA methods and the importance of BCMA implementation. Pharmacists were needed to assist nurses in case if a scanning error occurred. Pharmacy, nursing, and informatics staff members were responsible for evaluation of the BCMA system upon implementation.

Medication errors are among the most significant cause of patient injury in all types of medical errors (Johnson, Carlson, Tucker, & Willette, n.d). In the nursing profession, medication administration errors occur 34% of the time, second only to physician ordering errors (Gooder, 2011). The introduction of information technology, such as the Bar Code Medication Administration (BCMA), offers new opportunities for reducing medication administration errors. BCMA was developed by the Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center in 1998 to help improve the documentation of medication administration, decrease medication errors and provide

The following articles were reviewed for the purpose of addressing bar code scanning in medication administration. Nursing requires the critical skill of accurate medication administration. The use of electronic medication administration has brought about many changes in the healthcare field. The article,” What Determines Successful Implementation of Inpatient Information Technology Systems” (Spetz et al 2012), was reviewed to address the above question. Computerized patients records and bar-code medication systems continue to gain favor in healthcare. This idea spread across the nation in all VA sites (Spetz et al., 2012, p. 157), providing a safer environment for patient care.

While the use of barcode technology has had many applications in hospitals for quite some time it has only recently been used to address patient safety. Mitch Work (2005) views bar code technology as a particularly promising advance in the effort to reduce medical errors. Barcodes provide a valuable verification of medication administration by assuring that the "five rights" are confirmed: right patient, right medication, right dose, right time, and right route of administration. The use of barcode technology at the patient's bedside has shown notable gains in reducing medication administration errors, which may account for as many as 7,000 deaths per year in U.S. hospitals.

One study reported nurses' compliance rates of 90% (Paoletti et al., 2007), but the other study found that 20% of the drugs were administered without scanning the barcode to ensure right medication (Poon et al., 2010). Helmon et al (2009) reported an increased in compliance rate in checking patients' identities by scanning patients' wristbands in medical-surgical wards, but no difference in the ICUs. Possible reasons for non-compliance in ICUs could be due to high nurse-patient ratio, and that the nurses were often assigned to the same patients (Helmons et al., 2009). Non-compliance in barcode scanning and workarounds could possibly affect the medication error rates. Therefore, it is difficult to interpret the effect of BCMA on medication administration errors due to differences in study designs, study settings and outcome measurement. Further research is required to include more patient care units, and to examine the effect of nursing activities on the impact of BCMA and medication

. In a nut shell, Medication errors are expensive to any given healthcare center interms of cost, prolonged hospitalization, and death among other risks (Samp, Touchette, Marinac, & Kuo, 2014). If healthcare centers have a good understanding of short term and long term effects of these errors they will be able to justify why BCMA technology is important in redusing the cost, risk, and inefficiency associated with these

Medication error is one of the biggest problems in the healthcare field. Patients are dying due to wrong drug or dosage. Medication error is any preventable incident that leads to inappropriate medication use or harms the patient while the medication is in the control of the health care professional,or patient (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2015). It is estimated about 44,000 inpatients die each year in the United States due to medication errors which were indeed preventable (Mahmood, Chaudhury, Gaumont & Rust, 2012). There are many factors that contribute to medication error. However, the most common that factors are human factors, right patient information, miscommunication of abbreviations, wrong dosage. Healthcare providers do not intend to make medication errors, but they happen anyways. Therefore, nursing should play a tremendous role to reduce medication error

Primarily, this study intend to uncover some of the main strategies the nursing management and hospital leadership has put in place when implementing Barcode Medication Administration (BCMA) technology in nursing clinical areas to ensure effective and continued use of the system at Methodist hospital system in Dallas Texas.. My research will also establish whether the culture of safety and quality are maintained using their current strategies when carrying out the HIT in this case BCMA.

Parkview Medical Center in Pueblo, Colorado described how their facility started with barcode medication administration with a compliance rate of 98 percent or better in all inpatient areas, then added other workflows such as blood administration and specimen collection (Parker, 2015). In the current state, PatientTouch application reminds nurses if the patient hasn 't received their first dose education. Blood transfusions now use barcode scanning to cross check and witness each event. Because Parkview has focused on handheld mobility since 2007, the use of workstation-on-wheels is minimal. Parkview Medical Center reports the clinicians are thrilled that they don 't have to push around a cart to do barcode medication