Enhancing Quality and Safety (Essay Sample)

Enhancing Quality and Safety
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Capella University
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Enhancing Quality and Safety
Nurses are bound to exhibit patient safety measures and are accountable for promoting and maintaining patient safety and quality of care through their every-day practices. However, specific glitches threaten patient safety and quality of care, leading to medication administration safety issues, poor patient health, and unnecessary financial costs in hospital institutions. Among these issues include medication errors. Medication errors occur when patients receive inappropriate medications, regardless of the preventability of such occurrences. This paper examines how health care institutions enhance quality and safety by focusing on wrong intravenous infusion rates among adults in intensive care units, factors leading to the errors, solutions to improve patient safety, nurses' coordination in increasing patient safety, and appropriate stakeholders for the purpose.
Factors Leading to Wrong Intravenous Infusion Rates among Adults in Intensive Care Units
One of the most common forms of medication errors in most community hospitals in America is wrong intravenous (IV) infusion rates among adults in intensive care units (ICUs). These wrong infusion rates involve administering incorrect fluids into the patients' bloodstreams, including incorrect medication and incorrect dosages. The factors leading to wrong IV infusion rates among adults in ICUs include poor communication amongst the medical personnel, environmental distractions, and inadequate nurse staffing.
Poor communication amongst medical staff leads to wrong IV infusion rates among adults in ICUs, especially when nurses take shifts, leaving patients to different caregivers. These circumstances create room for error because of a lack of information regarding the patients' medication administration updates. Therefore, caregivers might be forced to rely on their knowledge during infusion instead of relying on the previous caregivers' information gathered from the previous shifts. Razzano et al. (2018) explain that IV infusion errors occur due to not following protocols. These protocols might include updating patients' information into patient databases and enhancing collaborative care amongst the health care staff. Therefore, the lack of communication amongst the interprofessional team during shift allocations is an example of not following the appropriate protocol that ensures patent safety and care quality.
Environmental distractions may also lead to infusion errors during medication administration, especially in environments experiencing inadequate nurse staffing. Inadequate nurse staffing forces one nurse to attend to numerous patients' medical needs, initiating the possibility of creating numerous preventable medication errors. These environments also increase the probability of under-performance amongst the nurses, risking the patients' wellness. Marznaki et al. (2020) estimate wrong infusion rates as 33% in ICUs, with higher infusion rates experienced in emergency care departments than in any other department.
Evidence-Based and Best Practice Solutions to Improve Patient Safety
The two most-appropriate evidence-based and best practice solutions to improve patient safety include improving communication systems and utilizing appropriate technology to reduce medication errors. Hospital institutions must adopt proper communication channels through modern technology tools to improve medication administration among patients. These systems include patient databases where patients' medication history is automatically updated into the program to avoid wrong dosage, over-dosage, and under-prescription issues.
Appropriate medication administration tools that minimize medication errors include barcode wristbands and infusion pumps (Strudwick et al., 2018). Not only do these tools reduce medication errors, but they also reduce costs associated with the errors. Razzano et al. (2018) identify how the infusion management interoperability initiative reduced IV infusion errors while also saving on costs at the Great River Medical Center (GRMC). The initiative recorded only 1% of dose correction after implementing infusion pumps with reporting software, saving the hospital possible infusion-incurred costs amounting to $87,500 (Razzano et al., 2018).
How Nurses Can Help Coordinate Care
Nurses can help coordinate care to increase patient safety with medication administration and reduce costs through various initiatives. First, nurses should practice effective communication amongst themselves, regardless of the hospital's communication technology advancements (Sibiya, 2018). Nurses taking shifts should continually report their patients' progress with regular updates regarding their medication administration. Secondly, nurse supervisors should regularly oversee appropriate updates of patients' medication information in their respective databases. Lastly, nurses should cooperatively establish checklists while performing primary patient care to align their actions with their patients' signs of progress (Sibiya, 2018). Eventually, communication, supervision, and checklists reduce medication errors and their costs.
Stakeholders Needed for Coordination of Care with Nurses
The stakeholders needed to drive quality and safety enhancement with nurses include patients, nursing e