The Problem Of Medication Errors

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,

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 for error in hospitals.” Although not all medication errors occur during transition it is the time most prevalent for these errors to occur. As per Johnson, Guirguis, and Grace (2015) “An estimated 60% of all medication errors occur during transition of care. The National Transitions of Care Coalition defines a transition of care as the movement of patients between healthcare locations, providers, or different levels of care within the same location as their conditions and care needs change, [and] frequently involves multiple persons, including the patient, the family member or other caregiver(s), nurse(s), social worker(s), case manager(s), pharmacist(s), physician(s), and other providers.”

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

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

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 to reduce medication errors. One suggestion I would make is to look at the grading rubric. There are four main points that the rubric requires to complete the objectives for the paper. I usually create headings that align with the rubric, this helps me organize my thoughts and to meet the objectives of the assignment.

Adverse drug events are the sixth leading cause of death in the United States and represent a significant financial burden to healthcare institutes at an estimated cost of $5.6 million per hospital per year (Meguerditchian N, Krotneva, Reidel, Huang, & Tamblyn, 2013). According to The Joint Commission (2006), medication reconciliation is the process of comparing a patient’s medication orders to all of the medications the patient has been taking. This reconciliation is done to identify and resolve medication discrepancies, which are unintended or unexplained

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.

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.

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,

Medication errors are among the most common medical errors, harming and costing millions of patients in the world very year. Prevention of medication errors is, therefore, a high priority worldwide. Nowadays, various information technology (IT) systems are widely used to prevent and reduce medication errors. Computerized physician order entry (CPOE) with patient-specific decision support is one of the most powerful IT systems used by physicians to improve patient safety in various healthcare settings. As an example, application of CPOE systems has significantly reduced errors related to dosing of psychoactive medications. Pharmacy dispensing systems, including drug-dispensing

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 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.

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