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Medication Error And Medication Errors

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Medication error 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 The reality is that human’s make mistakes. Caregiver’s fatigue and stress plays a huge role in medication error. It is reported that fatigue and stress increased the risk of medication error. In a study comparing nurses who worked a 12 hour shift in different age groups, older nurse’s experienced sleeping trouble and were not able to focus on maintaining their performances during their shift (the average age of US registered nurses is 46.8). Fatigue is related to misreading labels, because somehow one is not fully conscious, a nurse who worked a 16 hour shift went into the medication

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