Identifying Effective Strategies to Reduce Medication Errors
Introduction
Nurses are responsible for the largest percentage of medication errors. Medication errors adversely affect more than 7 million patients, cost almost $21 billion and result in excess of one million emergency room visits and 3.5 million additional visits to doctors’ offices each year (Stoppler & Marks, 2018).
Research Question
Problem: Medication errors remain the leading cause of adverse incidents for inpatients in the United States.
Intervention: Develop and disseminate an attractive and informative poster that underscores the severity of the problem and its causes, and provides nursing… Continue Reading...
and non-disclosure of a personal error and the course of action that would be most appropriate when medication errors are detected. Further, it would also be prudent to evaluate strategies and approaches to minimize education errors.
One of the most important considerations, from an ethical perspective, that health practitioners ought to make with reference to the disclosure of medication errors is whether or not they (or their loved ones) would like to be notified if they were to find themselves in a similar scenario. For one to have a fair expectation of protection from harm, he or she should apply the same standard to others with respect… Continue Reading...
each year in the United States alone; the number of medication errors that did not lead to adverse effects but remained undisclosed is unknown (Jenkins & Vaida, 2007, p. 41). The scenario is this: You are working as an advanced practice nurse at a community health clinic. You make an error when prescribing a drug to a patient. You do not think the patient would know that you made the error, and it certainly was not intentional.
Disclosure is an ethical and legal prerogative, showing respect for the patient and a willingness to accept professional responsibility. Consequentialist ethics do not… Continue Reading...
2012) found that 19% of the total number of medication doses administered involved a minimum of 1 error – with approximately half of these falling under wrong-time errors. Medication errors could be triggered by a wide range of factors.
Studies conducted in the past have clearly indicated that such factors as disruptions and interruptions, general work environment, and failure to maintain ward stock ware are to blame for wrong-time errors (Keers, Williams, Cooke, and Ashcroft, 2013). In that regard, therefore, healthcare organizations ought to take into consideration these factors in an attempt to take corrective and remedial measures meant to minimize instances of patients being offered medications in a format that is not timely, thereby leading to noncompliance.… Continue Reading...
