Medication Errors: Applying Research Skills NHS FPX 4000 Assignment 2 Attempt 1 Applying Research Skills
Drug administration is an integral part of nursing. Medication errors can be pernicious to patients’ health. Medicines are prescribed by physicians and dispensed by pharmacists but the responsibility of correct administration rests within the scope of nurse practice. Each nurse is individually responsible for their practice. The result of medication errors varies from mild to deadly. But these errors can be widely preventable by strictly maintaining and following the five rights of drug administration- the right patient, the right drug, the right dose, the right route and the right time.
According to the National Coordinating council for medication error prevention and Analysis (NCC MERP), medication error is defined as “any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm while the medication is in the control of a healthcare provider, patient, or consumer”.
As a professional registered nurse, it is my responsibility to keep my patients safe. When caring for patients at the long-term care facility, there might be shifts that you care for 18-22 patients and you are in charge of medication administration for those patients. Few months back I recalled an event when I was working as an evening shift nurse supervisor. I received a call from the floor nurse reporting an incident, a medication error. The floor nurse was preparing medication for the evening rounds but got distracted by a family member who was visiting their father. The nurse had to stop the medication preparation because of this distraction. After the conversion with the family member, the nurse resumed the medication preparation but this time was distracted by a phone call and at the same time the nursing assistant reported to the nurse that one of the resident’s was requesting his pain medication. The nurse while on the phone went to medication cart and pulled out medication what she thought it was for the right patient but instead it was another tablet which had similar packing. The nurse administered the drug without performing the five rights of drug administration. During the shift change, nurse noted a discrepancy in narcotics and then realized the medication was pulled from the wrong cabinet. The incident was reported in our safety portal and the patient was monitored for any adverse effects. This particular incident helped me to realize the importance of following the five rights of drug administration and to avoid any distraction such as phone calls, updating family with resident’s progress during medication rounds.
Identifying Academic Peer reviewed journal articles and Assessing credibility
When searching for the best articles for the topic that I chose, I used the search engine, called Summon which can be found in Capella University page under the library tab. For the specific topic, I searched for the articles by using the keywords like medication safety, medication error, packaging improvements and staff education. I filtered my search by selecting peer-reviewed, journal articles and publication date within five years. In addition to the Summon search engine, I have searched for articles using google scholar search engine but paid attention to avoid websites with unreputable sources.
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I chose journals that are well known and published with in the past five years. I read article thoroughly to asses if the data/ information is accepted by additional articles. Peer reviewed journals and articles are scholarly reliable source for information on a topic. It is a type of quality control.
Annotated Bibliography
Escriva Garcia, J; Aparisi Sanz, A., Brage Serrano, R., Fernandez, Garrido, J. (2020). Medication errors and risk area in a critical care unit. Journal of Advanced nursing,77(1),286-295.https://doi-org.library.capella.edu/10.1111. This article discussed mainly the medication errors, their causalities and the highest risk areas in critical care. The article discussed about the systematic analysis of the prescription, transcription and administration records of 2,634 dose unit of medication that were administrated to a total of 87 critically ill patients during 2018. For data collection, social demographic characteristics were also taken into consideration. The article points out that upon reviewing prescription and transcription records, they identified a total of 174 errors, approximately 71% occurred during the prescription of the script and the remaining 29% on the transcription time. In conclusion, nurse transcription behaves as an important filter in the pharmacotherapeutics process as it foresees and prevents many errors that may reach t