The Problem Of Medication Errors

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 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

. 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.

The purpose of this paper is to bring forth awareness when it comes to patients and medication errors and further educates health care professionals on the importance of communication especially during transition of care. According to Williams and Ashrcoft (2013) “ An estimated median of 19.1 % of total opportunities

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

Errors made while administering medications is one of the most common health care errors reported. It is estimated that 7,000 hospitals deaths yearly are attributed to medication administration errors.

Excellent outline for your quality improvement initiative that addresses medication errors. I like how you describe the closed-loop medication administration process that includes all members of the interprofessional team. Your references are also well researched and current. From the outline, it is unclear what the barriers and implementation strategy are

Medication Errors and the five rights 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,

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

The issues addressed are Findings 1 and 3: Finding 1 is patient medication errors are up and there is a perception of shady hiring practices and playing favorites. All employees are responsible for compliance. Policies and professional standards exist for the medical profession. The challenges will be reintroducing employees to Federal and state law that govern the profession. For hiring practices and playing favorites the challenges faced are the lack of compliance reporting structure or training for understanding compliance. There is a perception that work rules are not being enforced. Finding 3 is high job turnover and low employee morale. The challenges faced will be building communication strategies, building confidence in leadership,

As defined by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA, 2015), a medication error is “any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or harm to a patient.” In order to prevent harm by medications, nurses and nursing students alike are required to adhere to the “seven patient rights,” which help eliminate any possible errors in the medication administration process. These seven rights include: right patient, right drug, right dose, right route, right time, right action and right documentation. However, many medication errors continue to occur because one or more of these rights is either violated, or omitted altogether. Research done by Polifroni, et al. (2003), shows that the most common errors in medication administration are those involving the time of administration and the dosage amount. These errors are often a direct result of the nurse’s increasingly chaotic practicing environment. Increasing nursing shortages create a larger patient load for each nurse, making is easier for the nurse to get distracted and inadvertently miss the dose,

Medication Errors: A Literature Review your name here Pharmacology 2 teachers name here September 17 2008 The American Society of Hospital Pharmacists define a medication error as “episodes of drug misadventure that should be preventable through effective systems controls involving pharmacists, physicians and other prescribers, nurses, risk management personnel, legal counsel, administrators, patients and others in the organizational setting, as well as regulatory agencies and the pharmaceutical industry” (Armitage, G., & Knapman, H. 2003 ).This paper shall discuss the various causes of, and methods for the prevention of medical errors. In looking at this

Medication errors originate in multiple ways such as “professional practice, health care products, procedures, and systems, including prescribing; order communication; product labeling, packaging, and nomenclature; compounding; dispensing; distribution; administration; education; monitoring; and use” (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2015). Many patients may be quick to criticize medication errors to be the responsibility of the professional who administers the medication rather than the manufacturing, production and data entry processes.

The Use of Intravenous Pumps to Reduce Medication Errors Angelina David Adelphi University Introduction Intravenous infusion therapy is an infusion of fluids directly into the patient’s bloodstream via a vein using an intravenous catheter. It is frequently used in hospital settings for patients that require a rapid onset of medication and for those who are unable to receive medications orally. According to Adams and Urban (2012), intravenous (IV) infusion is considered to be the most dangerous route of receiving medications because medication cannot be retrieved once it enters the bloodstream. Patients receiving IV infusion therapy require close monitoring for adverse reactions, which can happen immediately or it can take a couple of days for it to take effect. There are three types of IV administrations: large volume infusions, intermittent infusions, and IV push (p. 37). Patients receive IV therapy to for a variety of reasons including maintaining, restoring or replacing fluids and electrolytes, to administer medications, blood and blood products, nutritional feeds, chemotherapy, and pain mediations.

Medication administration is one nursing task that is considered a high-risk area for patient care (Gladstone, 1995). Studies had shown that “medication errors are the most common and preventable cause of patient harm… and should be immediately reported in order to facilitate the development of a learning culture” (Haw, Stubbs, & Dickens, 2014, p. 797). Thus, a nurse who