Medication Errors In Health Care

For many patients the scariest part of being in the hospital is having to rely on other people to control your life changing decisions. One large part of this is the medications one is given while in our care. I can only imagine what it must be like for patients to have a stranger to come in and start administering drugs to me. This would be especially scary if I did not know what these medications did, or what negative effects could be caused by taking them. Unfortunately, the fear of medication errors that many patients have are not unfounded. Estimates range from 1.5 to 66 million patients a year have medication errors occur while they are in the care of health care professionals. Considering all of the technology we have at our

Medication errors are a major issue affecting patient safety in hospitals, which can create deadly consequences for patients. It is crucial to identify and analyzed medication errors so healthcare professionals can pinpoint why medication errors occur and provide insight into how to prevent or reduce them.

Researchers have identified that hospitalized patients are subject to one medication administration error per day, implying that approximately 1.5 million preventable drug event arise yearly in the United State. Medication errors are among the most common medical error, costing more than 3.5 billion

medication to the wrong patient is personal neglect and this heinous mistake should be followed

There are many rules and precautions taken to ensure that medication errors do not happen. In nursing school students in the RNs and BSN program are both taught ways to not make medication errors. A study done by Margret Harris, Laura Pittiglio, Sarah Newton, and Gary Moore was done to see if simulation can be used to improve medication administration to reduce medical errors.

Thank you for educational and insightful post. You did an excellent job explaining all necessary steps how to deal with medication errors. According to Anderson and Townsend (2015), medication errors are the most common healthcare errors. Each error can cost somewhere between $2,000 to $ 8,750 of in-patient expenses and leads to more than 7,000 deaths annually. Interruptions and distractions, if it is to a prescriber or whoever is administering the medication, are among most common reasons why medication error occurs.

Medication errors are a one of the biggest causes of patient’s death. “Based on an analysis of prior research, the Johns Hopkins study estimates that more than 250,000 Americans die each year from medical errors. On the CDC's official list, that would rank just behind heart disease and cancer, which each took about 600,000 lives in 2014, and in front of respiratory disease, which caused about 150,000 deaths.”(Hopkins). “But no one knows the exact toll taken by medical errors. In significant part, that's because the coding system used by CDC to record death certificate data doesn't capture things like communication breakdowns, diagnostic errors and poor judgment that cost lives, the study says”(Hopkins). Medication errors can happen to anyone because humans are not perfect and they make mistakes. The lesson to be taken away from an error is how to prevent future ones.

Medication errors are a very common problem in the healthcare world. They can be very minor errors or they can kill a patient. There have been many new systems put in place to prevent and reduce medication errors but they continue to happen. Several different factors have been looked at to prevent medication errors including computer systems, hours worked, patient to nurse ratio, and years of experience.

Medication error can be very deadly, and mainly happens in the healthcare settings today in American. Medication Error cause around 10,000 of death and deaths every year far as given the wrong medication, to an patient can have a very bad allergic reaction from that wrong drug was given. On the other hand the most errors may happen if the drug name are similar to each other, also if it’s a sign of poor hand writing or poor transcriptions as well. To try to prevent mistakes is to pay an close attention to the medication, make sure you ask the patient his or her Date of Birth, and you can also scan the patient arm band. I think the safes way to go in check it 3 times before you initially give the patient the medication. Just to be on the

New research estimates up to 440,000 Americans are dying annually from preventable hospital errors. This puts medical errors as the third leading cause of death in the United States, underscoring the need for patients to protect themselves and their families from harm, and for hospitals to make patient safety a priority (Hospital Errors are the Third Leading Cause of Death in United States (n.d). This is a staggering statistic and shows the need for immediate changes in the administration of medications.

One of the many responsibilities of a nurse is administering medications. Improper transcription, dispensing, administering, and reporting can result in medication errors. The article Simple Steps to Reduce Medication Errors recognizes how detrimental errors can be to the patient and the facility (Chu, 2016). An error in medication can lead to an extended stay for the patient, resulting in serious harm or death.

About1.5 million people are harmed yearly in the U.S. because of medication errors, The National Coordinating Council for Medication Error Reporting and Prevention (NCCMERP) defines the meaning of medication error, they define it as “any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm while the medication is in the control of the health care professional, patient, or consumer…”. (Stoppler, 2015) It is a serious topic in the nursing field that should be addressed and prevented.

In the United States an estimated 1.3 million people are injured every year for “medication errors”. One of the main errors would be involving where the patient would take an improper dose of the medicine. This has even cause 41% of fatal medication errors. Patients would either be taking more than needed or not enough. Another medication error would be prescribing the wrong type of medication for the patient and it tied in with using the wrong route of administration. This error accounted for 16% of deaths in the United States. The medication error for prescribing the wrong type of medication could happen when there are two medications with a similar name. A physician could also prescribe more than one drug but not realize that they would

Within the first seven days of admission and readmission in a skilled nursing facility older people have an increase in medication errors. The study was put together to evaluate the process-related factors and structure that my cause and increase in medication errors as well as harm. The residents in North Caroline skilled nursing facilities during months of October 2006 to September 2007 showed medication errors from the medication error quality initiative-individual error database. When looking at the prescribing errors they were much less common than administration errors. However, they were much more likely to cause harm to patients. On the contrary looking at structure and process measures of quality, they were related to the volume

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