Overall Contributing Factors To Medication Administration Errors (Proofreading Sample)

Overall contributing factors to medication administration errors
Scholars are categorizing the contributing factors to medication errors differently. According to Dooley, Wiseman, & Gu (2012), adoption of error-prone abbreviations to prescribe medication is the contributing factors of misinterpretation resulting to medication error. The error-prone abbreviations inpatient drug prescribing is common. Data collected across three Australian hospitals found that about (76.9%) of patients were experiencing a series of error-prone abbreviations that were being utilized in specifying. Only eight point four orders had one error- prone abbreviation and 29.6% had a high probability of causing significant harm.
Cheragi et al. (2013) identified that the popular types of medication errors among 237 nurses were infusion and wrong dosage. However, the paramount causes attribute to the using abbreviations rather than using all names of the drugs or related names of drugs. Therefore, inadequate pharmacological knowledge was the primary cause of medication errors.
Elmira & Petrova (2010) established that nurse’s perception about medication error such as any factor contributing to the error need to be controlled. Some of the factors are nurse’s tiredness because of much work, doctors' indecipherable handwriting, and interruption while administering drugs.
Literature shows that nursing manifold majorly causes the factors attributing to medication errors, back from 1988 to 2007 and they are both individual and systems issues (Brady, Malone, & Fleming, 2009). They include types of drug allotment networks, medication reconciliation, too much workload, the nature of prescriptions, nurses' awareness about drugs and adopting other procedures including distractions during administration.
Another study by Karavasiliadou & Athanasakis (2014) used the same categorized as individual and organizational factors but focused on other factors. The study focused on adding more details to different factors. For instance, they looked at miscommunication factors, medication package labeling misreading, and drug dosage miscalculation. These scholars also focused on studying non-adherence of the right steps of drug preparation by adopting checking-rechecking application of the five rights. They ensured they use the right dose, right time, right drug, and right patient. Finally, they were also looking at factors like challenges experienced when using infusion devices, personal factors such as neglect, nurse’s physical exhaustion and complication with physicians’ prescription. For instance, physicians have unclear verbal orders and poor handwriting. The study also established that the degree of nurses’ clinical experience is critical in a successful medication administration. In most cases, the organization factors that were of concern were working time, interruption during working, and nurse’s patient ration.
A study on factors contributing to medication errors by Keers et al. (2013) reported that the factors behind medication administration errors in hospital settings are mistakes influencing regulation errors. For example issues like infective written communication contributing to poor documentation, prescriptions, and transcription, challenges of drug supply and storage causing challenges on pharmacy dispensing errors and ward stock management. Other factors high workload, accessibility of different units, patients factors, staff health factors like fatigue and stress also contribute to medication error.
Nursing education is critical in preventing medication errors. Research by Ford et al. (2010) on comparing drug management error rates after and before attending educational sessions. They were adopting the conventional educative lecture and also titillation-based training among adult suffering from coronary heart disease and those with medical critical care units. It demonstrated that 24 nurses were seen giving drugs, charts, and quizzes before the time of intervention implementation for assessing knowledge. The findings show reveals patients use 880 doses after stimulation of education oriented intervention in the CCU. There was a decrease in drug administration error from 30.8% to 4%, but the error rate didn’t show a significant difference in MICU from baseline after the lecture intervention.
Lessened capacity for work, reduced efficiency, and feeling of tiredness may affect patient care. A study by Lewandowski (2010) conducted the University of Pennsylvania established that the fatigued nurses were three times more likely to make serious mistakes when attending patients. The mistakes can include medication errors, deviation from standard nursing practices, charting fault and errors in transcribing information. Also, RNs showed a correlation between the occurrence of medication errors and working more than 40 hours in a week‏.
The extensive review of the literature demonstrates that the physical environment is critical in the acute care setting (Chaudhury, Mahmood, & Valente, 2009). It impacts nursing and medication error, patient safety, hence contributes to staff fatigue, stress, and burnout resulting in errors.
Holden et al. (2011) used human factors model to conceptualized workload and found that workloads may affect health care provider and patient outcomes. The nurse’s workload affects the practice, patient safety, outcome, and quality. They recruited nurses in six units to test the model to test this model. Out of the six two academic tertiary care hospitals found a correlation between workload and outcome interest. Staffing Adequacy had an association with job satisfaction; mental workload correlates with interruption. Finally, divided attention and being rushed had a link with burnout and medication error likelihoods.
Another study conducted by several scholars to explore the latent failures thought to underpin medication error established ten potential failures from the results of interviews (Lawton et al., 2012). The factors are human resources, supervision, and leadership, the amount of work, harsh climatic condition, the environment of work, communication, daily procedures, bed arrangement, documented policies and procedures. Twelve nurses and eight managers were in the study for an interview. Keny (2013) identified confusing brand names that are mostly used in the Indian market. The method of naming depends on the therapeutic success, and the challenge was most brand names were looking similar (orthographic) and had the same phonetic sound. The researcher had to use observation technique for branding to identify implication of the drugs.
Reducing strategies of medication administration errors
Medication errors are popular incidents at emergency departments (Weant, Bailey, & Baker, 2014). Someone can eliminate these mistakes by learning the medication procedure in the emergency department to master measures targeting each step. The strategies can include computer-based entry systems medication-error analysis, progra...