Explain How the Procedures of the Work Setting Protect Both Children and Young People and Practitioners

Risk assessment is a powerful means by which individual children can be encouraged to manage their own medication. Through agreeing a number of risks of a child administering their own medication such as giving themselves an incorrect dose, procedures can be put into place

Health and safety policies and procedures help to provide a safe setting for children, parents, staff and volunteers. The policies and procedures will include: risk assessments, security, hygiene, fire emergency, first aid, sickness, accidents and incidents. Good quality care consists of taking steps to prevent illness and accidents, being prepared to deal with emergencies if and when they occur and educating children about health and safety matters. Nursery staff will report any item, practice or event which may affect the safety of children or adults, and the appropriate action

During the interview, R. Crowdis emphasized on different safety measures nurses can take to protect patients from medication errors. These include verifying and clarifying any orders that look ambiguous or that do not match the patient’s needs, use the five rights of medication, always scan the medication, have two separate nurses verify high risk medications, and follow hospital policy when wasting narcotics (R. Crowdis, Personal Communication, June 11, 2016). The five “rights” of medication R. Crowdis is referring to are the right patient, right medication, right dose, right route, and the right time (Archer, 2015, p. 394: Centre for Policy Agency, 2011). Every medication must be scanned and if unable to, then notify the unit director and pharmacy of the issue. Always scan each individual pill, even if there are multiples of the same kind; one pill may be expired, a different medication, or same medication but different dosage that was accidentally stocked by pharmacy. Watch for system lags or additional screens that appear for this may cause errors is medication administration when scanning. Athanasakis (2012) also recommends reducing distractions and interruptions during medication preparation and administration to help in the prevention of medication errors (p. 775). Having excess family and friends step out of the room, informing the patient of the medication, what it does, and double checking when the last dose was given are additional measure a nurse should take in the prevention of any

Medication errors commonly occur in healthcare facilities. According to the Joint Commission, these medication errors are believed to be the most common type of medical error and are a significant cause of preventable adverse events (The Joint Commission, 2008). Many experts agree with the research that medication errors have the potential to cause harm within the pediatric population about three times as higher than in the adult population. This is due to medication dosing errors that are weight-based dosing calculations, fractional dosing, and misplacement of the decimal point that can lead to overdosing or under dosing (The Joint Commission, 2008). Children are at greater risk than adults for medication errors because they have an immature physiology as well as developmental limitations that affect their ability to communicate and self-administer medications (The Joint Commission, 2008). Another important factor is that the great majority of medications are developed in concentrations appropriate for adults; therefore, pediatric indications and dosage guidelines often aren 't included with a medication, necessitating weight-based dosing or dilution (The Joint Commission, 2008). The need to alter the original medication dosage requires a series of pediatric-specific calculations and tasks, each significantly increasing the possibility of error (The Joint Commission, 2008). Additionally, an observation of safety regulations and practices by Nemours Children’s

The significance of this paper is to compare and contrast various risk factors related to medication errors in neonatal and geriatric patients. Medication errors are highly common in hospitalized patients across varying age spectrums and are highly prioritized in various healthcare systems around the world. Medication errors can be defined as any irregularity that occurs during the procedure of giving or using medications. Drug errors can arise from prescribing, dispensing, transcribing, administering and monitoring medicines (European journal, 2015). The essay explores and identifies specific risk factors of medication errors related

A study to determine the outlook of pediatric nurses concerning the causes, reporting, and prevention of medication errors was conducted in four pediatric hospitals in Turkey. An 11 question questionnaire was giving to 119 pediatric nurses (asking them what their thoughts were on causes of medication errors that

One important aspect of prescribing medication by an APN is they should consider the size of the child might not reflect the chronological age. Taking into consideration, the ability that the child must be able to metabolize and excrete the drug. The conflict of under and over medicating the child becomes a major problem. When the question of under medicating the children is an issue, the therapeutic level has not been reached, and the child is still sick. With the use of antibiotics for example, if the correct dosage is not given, bacterial resistance can occur. With the use analgesics, the child is still having discomfort after medicating this can be avoided, if the proper dosage was given. However,

There are many principles that underpin work with children and how they support a practitioner within a setting. One of the main principles is that the welfare of the child is paramount. This means that it is necessary for the practitioner to make sure that in any circumstance the child’s needs and

The policy and procedure I created in part one of my project was to prevent a pediatric patient, in this case, from being given the wrong dose of medicine. For my scenario, the patient was ordered to receive 100 GRAMS of a certain medication; instead, they were being given 100 MILLIGRAMS for the past three days. For my solution I implemented the

There is a set of ethics that those in the medical field have to abide by, and one of those ethical standards is to protect the health, safety, and rights of the patients. In order to withhold that standard, it is the nurses job to ensure the safety of their patients. Administrating medication is one task that problems can occur in. If a patients is given the wrong medication, dosage, or the medication is given to the wrong patient this can comprise the safety of the patients involved. This paper will discuss how the wrong medications are being given out, pharmacy problems with medication, and the different solutions to help solve the safety problems.

A similar model has been described2, but its relationship with patient safety has not been robustly determined. This is a concern as junior doctors make the most prescribing errors3, and this model leaves potential for unsigned medications to be given. It would be unethical to introduce a model that undermined patient safety, therefore we made the prescriptions more visible and incorporated an audit cycle to ensure prescriptions were easily identifiable and met the required standard.

The most conscientious thing for facilities to provide is Policies, procedures and standards for medication administration, Training and education, effective communication, medication cart auditing, monitoring and reporting mechanisms, stiff regulations investigations and enforcing standards of medication administration. In addition the facility can always take a proactive approach by placing interventions in effect immediately by endorsing transparent complaint reporting, make the report available for public viewing, require each staff member to report errors, provide training hours for medication administration and annual continuing education. Implement an Electronic Medication Record with a bar scan system that will help to identify each medication that is being administered, implement computerized physician orders provide medical error insurance for staff members, ban electronic devices for personal use in the workplace and notify family members that non-licensed staff members administer the medication at your facility and get their buy

So how does this align with the current National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards? It comes under standard 4, medication safety, which describes the systems and strategies to ensure clinicians safely prescribe, dispense and administer appropriate medications to informed patients (Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare, 2012, p. 3). Medicines are the most common treatment used in health care. Because of this commonality, medicines are connected with higher incidence of errors and adverse events when compared to other healthcare interventions. Some of these events are costly and potentially avoidable. Many solutions to prevent medication errors are found in standardisation and systemisation of processes. A recognised

Upon receipt of information provided and recorded as above, staff is responsible to check the prescription / pharmacy label on medication, medication within ‘best before’ date, child’s name on label with GP telephone number and the practitioner’s initial as a confirmation of the checked data.

A dispensing error can be viewed as “a discrepancy between a prescription and the medicine that the pharmacy delivers to the patient or distributes to the ward on the basis of this prescription” (Cheung, Bouvy, & De Smet, 2009 [5]). Dispensing errors can be categorized according to distinct features, such as dispensing medication to the incorrect patient, wrong time, incorrect quantity, incorrect medicine, among several other categories (Cheung et al., 2009). In one Brazilian study, 45% of dispensing errors on a pediatric ward were categorized as content errors that included discrepancies in dosage quantity and concentration (Silva et al., 2011 [4]).