NURS FPX 4020 Assessment 1 Root-Cause Analysis and Safety Improvement Plan
An important step would be to invest in the training of nurses for the correct maintenance, usage, and monitoring of infusion pumps. Another crucial step of implementation should focus on designing the workflows again and structured process changes so that the efficiency of the pump is better. These steps focus on the nurses as they work closely with the patient so they have an important role when handling materials. The streamlining and standardization of the processes has been proved to be good facilitator along with education or training to reduce medication errors (Bacon et al., 2020). Such strategies would help patients like Sam get the appropriate rate when getting infusion pumps, and increase their quality of care as nurses would be more educated, have more awareness, and follow a streamlined workflow. Implementation of technology can also prevent the wrong rate or doses as the programming would be automated rather than manual, providing an alarm or notification system in cases of any negligence.
Viable Evidence-Based Safety Improvement Plan
The best safety improvement plan that would involve the right strategies to mitigate the errors associated with wrong doses or rates being set such as in the case of infusion pump would be to create a multidisciplinary team. Multidisciplinary teams allow effective collaboration and communication, and the assigned leadership roles in this team can allow the team members to follow protocols strictly. The division of tasks in such a team would avoid workload and indirect patient care tasks related to the infusion pumps could be divided so there is no undivided attention when setting up a pump. This improvement plan should also consider training the working staff and providing them education to handle different technology, and maintenance of devices, knowing high-risk drugs, recognizing medication errors, and recognizing the consequences related to medication errors.
Integration of smart and modern pumps are being incorporated to prevent errors. Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) recommends using smart infusion systems that have a barcode reader so they can be linked with electronic health records (Taylor & Jones, 2019) This would save the nurses from manually entering the information which would significantly prevent errors. There should be an urge to promote multidisciplinary teams including all the frontline staff and relevant stakeholders to consider pump designs, be involved in decision-making, and consider safety-related features. This team would also apply improvement processes for quality to review data and provide solutions. Such processes have proven to produce a range of improvements in health care facilities (Taylor & Jones, 2019). Several literature reviews of evidence show that the workflows and protocols are important to any use of technology and should be considered when using smart infusion pump technologies (Bacon et al., 2020). The evidence has also supported the education to promote the safe use of infusion pumps (Bacon et al., 2020). Such streamlining of workflows and implementation of protocols can only come about in a multidisciplinary team to promote a safe environment.
Timeline
The timeline for the implementation of this strategy will take about 2 months. The first month will be for policy-making and strategizing with the administration and executive members, along with giving training and refresher courses to the nurses at the same time. After this period is completed and the policy is made, the second month will be used to implement the new policy and guidelines for reducing medication administration errors. If improvement is seen then the policy will be finalized and for the nurses, the courses will continue on as deemed necessary.
Existing Organizational Resources That Could be Leveraged
Nurses must know about utilizing the organizational resources effectively to reduce costs and errors too. Organizational managers or administrators should set up a multidisciplinary team to divide tasks. Interventions of smart infusion pumps with the newest technology can be provided to the nurses to save time. There should be an error reporting program in the organization so no medication error is unreported and all the cases can be analyzed from the root to avoid them in the future.
For medication error reporting programs to be successful, it should be safe for the one reporting so effective changes can be made along with useful or constructive recommendations. The organization must adopt an environment that is effective for reporting medication errors to make it a better practice (Mutair et al., 2021).
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Conclusion
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