Medication Errors Research Paper

In today’s current fast-paced and demanding field of heath care, medication administration has become complex and time-consuming task. Approximately one-third of the nurses’ time is used in medication administration. There is much potential for error because of the complexity of the medication administration process. Since nurses are the last ones to actually administer the medication to the patient therefore they become responsible for medication administration errors (MAE). Reasons for MAE may include individual factors, organizational factors or system factors. This paper will discuss the root causes analysis of MAE and strategies to prevent them.

There are many factors that contribute to medication errors resulting in consequences to both patient and nurse. Factors that can contribute to errors include illegible handwritten drug orders, confusing drug names, and the use of nonstandard or unclear abbreviations (Neal, 2006). For the patient, the effect of drug errors can range from no side effects to death. For the nurse who commits a medication error the consequences can range from additional training and supervision to lawsuits and revocation of licensure. Medication errors can occur at any stage in the process of delivering medications to patients, from the originating prescriber to the pharmacy, but the majority of medication errors occur during administration.

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.

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

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

There are now computers in every room, in almost every healthcare facility. Nurses now chart most of their medication administrations in the room and can focus on one patient at a time. A nurse must scan the patient’s band or some identifier and scan the meds before giving the medication to the patient. The computer program will tell the nurse if he or she made a mistake with the time of medication, wrong dosage, wrong medication, and/or wrong patient. In a hospital in England, there was a declined in medication errors from 8.6 percent to 4.4 percent when a new computer system was implemented. Prescription errors were also reduced from 3.8 percent to 2 percent. The new system was computerized order entry, automated dispensing, and had electronic medication administration records. Technology has greatly reduced the percent of medical errors, but not all of them, but by studying different systems and modifying systems hopefully medication errors will be a thing of the past (Hughs & Blegen,

This integrative review sought to identify and understand the impact of information technology in on medication errors. The review of 14 papers shows that the implementation of medication management systems, which include CPOE, BCMA and automated dispensing machines has successfully reduced medication errors and adverse medication events significantly, particularly the two most susceptible stages of prescription and administration of drugs (Armada et al., 2014).

Medication Reconciliation is defined by the Joint Commission as the process of checking and rechecking a patient’s current medication list to the patient’s orders. Within a MedRec program, three steps must be followed to ensure patients have the correct medications at admission and discharge: Verification, Clarification, and Reconciliation (Greenwald et al., 2010; Ruggiero et al,. 2015). MedRec should not occur once, but multiple times especially when a patient moves from department to department. The more a patient moves, the more liable they are for a medication error due to poor communication. MedRec is done for the simple reason of catching those medication errors and correcting them before they can do any harm (The Joint Commission, 2006). Medication errors effect nearly 1.5 million people who enter the hospital setting in the USA. At least every patient has one medication discrepancy between admission and discharge, which leads to rehospitalizations due to hospital-setting medication errors (Institute of Medicine as cited by Wilson et al,. 2015). With nurses at the forefront of a patient’s medication regime, pressure is put on them to provide the necessary education and safety to prevent medication related rehospitalizations. Included in the causes for medication errors is miscommunication between departments taking care of the same patient (Allison et al., 2015). Many medication errors are preventable by the implementation of electronic orders. The use of electronic

Medication errors are a reoccurring issue that has plagued the medical field since the beginning of drug administration. In order to understand how to handle medication errors, one must first understand what a medication error is. The concept of medication error can be defined as: “any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or harm to a patient” (Kee, 2012, 125). Examples of medication errors include: misreading a patient’s medical file, not clarifying illegible prescriptions, an incomplete patient assessment, confusing look-alike and sound-alike medications, and lack of better understanding if a medication can be crushed or split. To better understand medication errors and medication safety one must understand the impact it can have on the medical community and patient care, ways to prevent medication errors, and what should be done in a situation where a medication error has occurred.

The Inner City Clinic is experiencing problems with medication prescribing errors and seeks a resolution to this problem through use of electronic medical records and registration medication reconciliation. The Institute of Medicine reports in the work entitled "Preventing Medication Errors" that the "average hospitalized patient is subject to at least one medication per day. This is reported to confirm previous research findings that medication errors represent the "most common patient safety error." (Barnsteiner, nd, p.1) Medication reconciliation is described as follows:

Patient centered care and patient safety are the most important roles in nursing. “Serious medication errors are common in hospitals and often occur during order transcription or administration of medication” (Poon et al., 2010. p. 1). One important aspect of nursing is drug administration. It is a multidisciplinary task including doctors, pharmacist and nurses. This paper will show evidence that using electronic medication systems instead of paper based systems to administer medication will reduce medication errors.

Medication Errors Caused By Interrupting Administration4As for environmental interruptions, an overview of what is causing the distractionwithin the workplace needs to be determined first. A solution to a noisy room may be the use of floor or ceiling materials or even wall covers to muffle sounds (Mahmood,Chaudhury, Valente. 2011, p. 229).Personal fearI personally fear I will give the patient too much medication and create an even more critical situation for myself as a nurse than I had before. In clinical, I take my time with the process of passing medications and review with the nurse prior to going into the patient's room. I always make sure to go through the six patient rights verbally, as well with my nurse, to make sure we are on the

Medication errors are the leading cause of morbidity and preventable death in hospitals (Adams). In fact, approximately 1.5 million Americans are injured each year as a result of medication errors in hospitals (Foote). Not only are medication errors harmful to patients but medication errors are very expensive for hospitals. Medication errors cost America’s health care system 3.5 billion dollars per year (Foote).Errors in medication administration occurs when one of the five rights of medication administration is omitted. The five rights are: a) the right dose, b) the right medication, c) the right patient, d) the right route of administration, and e) the right time of delivery (Adams). Medication administration is an essential part of

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

Nurses are responsible for multiple patients on any given day making medication errors a potential problem in the nursing field. Medication administration not only encompasses passing medication to the patients yet begins with the physician prescribing the medication, pharmacy filling the correct prescription and ending with the nurse administering and monitoring the patient for any adverse effect from the medication. According to the National Coordinating Council for Medication Error Reporting and Prevention (NCCMERP), ‘A medication error refers to any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm while the medication is in the control of the healthcare professional,