Enhancing Quality and Safety

Patient safety and quality care are two of the most significant challenges faced by health care facilities, nurses, physicians, and other health care professionals. Poor quality and issues to patient safety will lead to morbidity, mortality, increased cost of care and hospital stay, lower patient satisfaction, and job satisfaction, and other issues. Some of the most common patient safety issues are medication administration errors, poor patient handling, delayed care, hospital-acquired infections, patient falls, and other issues. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the medication administration issue relating to patient safety, best evidence-based practices, and analyze coordination between nurses and stakeholders. 

Patient-safety risk focusing on medication administration

Medication administration is a critical process where nurses play a key role. However, stakeholders such as physicians, pharmacists, informatics nurses, and other health care professionals contribute to it as the process includes medication prescription, dosage calculation, medication dispensing, and error monitoring. Error in any of the stages will lead to medication administration errors. This will result in adverse events. For example, the prescription error rate varied from 6% to 77.2% (Korb-Savoldelli et al., 2018), dispensing errors varied from 1.2% to 46% (Kumar et al., 2019), and wrong dosage and omission error varied from 8% to 26% in health care (Palese et al., 2019). Suclupe et al. (2020) found in their study that 6-25% of errors were caused by nurses. This indicates that human errors are a major factor. 

Another factor is interferences during medication administration. Interferences from patients or their families disturb the normal work process, which results in medication mix-up and delayed administration. Thomas et al. (2017) pointed out that nurses feel excessive cognitive load when there are distractions and interruptions. Frequency interruptions reduce throughput and efficiency, which culminates into errors. Also, conversations with other nurses during administration increase the risk of medication errors (Huckels-Baumgart et al., 2017). For example, nurses discussing about other patients during administration can lead to confusion. 

Nurse to patient ratio is another major factor as an increased number of patients per nurse increases burnout in nurses. Burnout leads to lower cognitive functioning and leads to poor decision-making and errors (Montgomery et al., 2020). Another major factor is poor communication between nurses, physicians, informatics nurses, and pharmacists as misinformation regarding dosage or wrong patient records in EHRs result in medication errors. These can result in adverse effects (Tsegaye et al., 2020). In their study, Tsegaye et al. (2020) found that the prevalence of administration errors was due to wrong assessment (27%), wrong evaluation (26.7%), and wrong time (38.7%). A significant relationship between lack of training, failure to adhere to administration rights, unavailability of guidelines, and medication errors was observed (Tsegaye et al., 2020). For example, the use of abbreviations, no knowledge regarding change of packaging and FDI regulations, and guidelines by IOM and QSEN result in medication errors (Montgomery et al., 2020). 

Risk factors include mortality, morbidity, and adverse effects. Every year, 7000 to 9000 patients in the US die due to medication errors (Tariq et al., 2021). The errors lead to increased hospital stay cost o $40 billion per year with more than 7 million patients affected by the issue (Thomas et al., 2017). Further, risk factors such as high volume, inexperienced staff, poor follow-up, monitoring, and policy enforcement, poor handwriting, errors in EHRs, workplace culture, external stress, and verbal orders contribute to the risk to patient safety (Tariq et al., 2021).

NURS FPX 4020 Assessment 1: Enhancing Quality and Safety

Evidence-based and best practice solutions

The first EBP solution is to train and educate nurses and health care staff to follow the guidelines provided by IOM and QSEN. The guidelines include being vigilant and verify medication with EHRs, check for allergies, assess the medication before administration, diligently calculate dosage (Armstrong, 2019), use memory aids and checklists, avoid workarounds, avoid conversations during administration, consider one patient at a time, clarify an unclear prescription, and avoid abbreviations (Pop & Finocchi, 2016). The process reduces cost as it prevents adverse effects of