Implementing Quality & Safety Improvements in Medication Administrations

Hanson, A., & Haddad, L. (2021). Nursing rights of medication administration [E-book]. StatPearls. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK560654/

This book identifies the nurse’s responsibility when administering medications to patients. It claims nurses have a standard guideline of instructions to minimize patients’ risks. It bases the instructions on the implementation of five “rights” which includes the sequence of:

• Right Patient
• Right Drug
• Right Route
• Right Time
• Right dose

This makes sure that a correct recipient is identified before prescribing a medication, the right drug is being administered to the patient by making sure the name of the patient and the drug, nurses should be educated about the safe delivery of drugs, drugs should be administered at the right time, and the correct concentration should be given. This resource is helpful for registered nurses, emergency room nurses, and students of nursing as it provides a guideline for the nurses to follow through. Emergency room nurses can highly benefit from this as they would have a checklist of these five rights to quickly double-check when a patient suddenly arrives in the ER needing quick treatment making the chances of error happening to rise. For example, in a case where nurses do not have such protocols to make sure safe medication administration, the nurses might be unsure or feel lost as to if they followed the right track. 

Khalil, H., & Lee, S. (2018). The implementation of a successful medication safety program in primary care. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 24(2), 403–407. https://doi.org/10.1111/jep.12870

NURS FPX 4020 Assessment 4 Attempt 1 Improvement Plan Tool Kit

Improving patient safety should be the priority of an organization and for that nurse training has been recognized to be a crucial step to minimizing error. This study was set up to analyze the success of the implementation of the medication safety program in rural Australia. This safety program consists of the implementation of the newly developed medication safety guidelines, delivery of safety training to clinicians, and collection of baseline medication incidents in an organization. The results of this study showed improved knowledge of the clinicians’ and the behavior, confidence, and attitude of the clinicians’ increased significantly. This study consisted of stages that were to communicate, collaborate, and connect. This shows the importance of such training programs that emphasize the culture of patient safety, identifying the issue and types of medication errors, understanding the medication incident reports, and applying of an evidence-based approach in daily practices. If the clinicians and managing nurses go through this resource, they can highly benefit from this awareness of how training is highly important. Following this, there could be changes in policies to set up workshops to improve the behavior and attitude of the clinicians so there is effective communication and collaboration. In a case where. there was no attention paid to the behavior of the clinicians which resulted in poor communication and commitment, the errors would never be avoided. There will always be a chance of adverse events due to miscommunication or misunderstandings as there would be a lack of transparency.

Melton, K. R., Timmons, K., Walsh, K. E., Meinzen-Derr, J. K., & Kirkendall, E. (2019). Smart pumps improve medication safety but increase the alert burden in neonatal care. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 19(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-019-0945-2

The implementation of smart pumps has been said to be successful in increasing the quality of care and patient satisfaction. They prevent manual programming and other indirect tasks that distract the nurses leading to medication errors. They provide alerts of wrong infusion conditions avoiding cases like the one with Sam. This study concluded that when compliance with dose error-reducing software is high, medication safety is improved. This is an important resource for all roles of nurses to recognize the newer technology and help the administration to implement such in the organization for better quality care and patient satisfaction. Failure in cases of recognizing the right technology would lead to wastage of potential and resources to be implemented in the right place which would lead to the same manual systems being used causing burnout in the nurses and causing them to lose focus resulting in medication errors. 

Value of Resources to Reduce Patient Safety Risks

Philips, J., Malliaris, A., & Bakerjian, D. (2021). Nursing and Patient Safety. Nursing and Patient Safety. https://psnet.a