Medication Errors and Patient Safety
Even though several nursing issues and concerns exist in healthcare settings today, I have chosen medication errors due to their high prevalence and adverse effect on the patient, and sometimes on the nurse. Medication errors account for at least one death occurrence every day. About 1.3 million Individuals are annually reported to have been affected by medication errors in one way or another (Izadpanah et al., 2018). The issue has been ranked number one among the five patient safety concerns. Unfortunately, the problem has persisted even after the adoption and implementation of electronic health records. However, the fact that these issues can be prevented provides hope that such cases would be minimized.
Medication errors are often caused by mistakes made by healthcare personnel. In order to eliminate such costly issues, nurses should incorporate an effective handoff communication strategy to prevent miscommunications that always result in errors. Physicians should equally strive to make accurate diagnoses upon which the prescription and administration of medication are based. The healthcare team should directly involve pharmacists in the treatment plan to provide guidance on which drugs should be given to patients and which one should not. Nonetheless, the electronic health records system should be made more interoperable to enhance communication between various departments.
This discussion has only limited information concerning the issue of medication errors. Any individual willing to have an intensive understanding of the problem can quickly obtain the required data from the CINAHL repository (Hood, 2018). The researcher should navigate to the homepage of the given nursing database and then click the Advanced Search link. From the various options that appear, the checkbox marked “Evidence-Based Practiced” should be checked. The research should, after that, enter the terms “medication errors” in the search text field and press the ‘enter’ button to initiate the search action. The action returns several journals and articles that have critical information about the issue being investigated by the research. It is now the responsibility of the researcher to evaluate the information sources and choose the most appropriate for their studies.
References
Hood, L. J. (2018). Leddy & Pepper’s professional nursing (9th ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Wolters Kluwer Health | Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
Izadpanah, F., Nikfar, S., Imcheh, F. B., Amini, M., & Zargaran, M. (2018). Assessment of Frequency and Causes of Medication Errors in Pediatrics and Emergency Wards of Teaching Hospitals Affiliated to Tehran University of Medical Sciences (24 Hospitals). Journal of Medicine and Life, 11(4), 299.