n your overview: Summarize the health care problem or issue. Describe your interest in the topic. Describe any professional experience you have with this topic. Identify peer-reviewed articles relevant to healthcare issues or problems. Search scholarly peer-reviewed literature related to the topic and describe the criteria you used to search for articles, including the names of the databases you used.

Applying Research Skills – Medication Errors

Medication administration is an area where safety safeguards and quality improvement measures in healthcare are sometimes compromised. Medication errors are preventable adverse events occurring when a patient takes the wrong medication or dosage. Regardless of the cause, medication errors present considerable harmful effects on patients. These errors affect more than seven million Americans annually and are responsible for 3.5 million hospital visitations. Nearly 9000 Americans die yearly because of these errors (Rasool et al., 2020). This highlights the need to address this issue. Current approaches focus on educating medical staff involved in medication handling, improving medication packages to eliminate technical errors that may be apparent during medication administration, and training patients on medication safety. Regulatory bodies such as the Joint Commission hold care organizations accountable in their efforts to lessen medication errors. They require care organizations to conduct a root cause analysis for all error incidents to inform appropriate action plans to lower the health effects of these errors (Rasool et al., 2020). This has enabled care organizations to be at the forefront of implementing safety and quality improvement measures related to medication errors.

Healthcare provider-related errors account for the majority of all reported adverse events in the hospital setting. As a caregiver, I owe it to the patients to embrace judicious medication handling to minimize these errors. My specific interest in this topic is to embrace the best medication handling and administration practices to lead the fight against medication errors. Having worked in an inpatient clinical setting, I have witnessed the adverse events of wrong dosing as a form of medication administration errors. For this reason, addressing this issue remains a priority for me.

Peer-Reviewed Articles Relevant to Medication Errors

An online web search was conducted to locate peer-reviewed articles on medication errors. Several peer-reviewed articles were identified. The ask, acquire, appraise, apply, and assess criteria were used to determine the suitability and conformity of various research articles to the thematic areas under scrutiny. These searches were conducted via the Summon search tool. Summon was selected because it is fast and provides results relevant to the topic under scrutiny. Specific keywords utilized when conducting these searches include medication errors, best practices in addressing medication administration errors, health information technologies that address medication administration errors, and care coordination as a tool for addressing medication errors. Four articles were identified that conformed to the thematic areas outlined.