Enhancing Quality & Safety

Healthcare systems are continuously growing and evolving their techniques and methods to improve patient safety and satisfaction. Nurses are the core assets that primarily interact with patients and are responsible for safe medication delivery. In the context of “NURS FPX4020 Assessment 1 Enhancing Quality & Safety,” However, medication administration errors are the major downfalls for the United States hospitals, as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) explains the high prevalence of medication administration errors in the United States. According to the FDA, almost one lac reports are filed regarding medication administration errors, for which most responsible members are pharmacies, nurses, hospitals, and doctors (Jacobson, 2021). Therefore, it is required to put barriers on the increment of these errors to maintain patient safety and the reputation of hospitals. In this assessment, we will discuss the medication errors encountered by the women and analyze the situation to understand what went wrong. 

Our scenario for this assessment is based on a woman named Elena, a 35-year-old pregnant lady who came to the hospital due to high blood pressure. After monitoring her appropriately, Elena was diagnosed with severe hypertension, and nifedipine medication was prescribed to her for safe pregnancy as prescribed by clinicians after profound observation and experiences (Malha & August 2019). The health practitioners prescribed her 60mg XL dose once a day to control her blood pressure and avoid severe circumstances (MD & Ohio State University, 2022). 

After a few days, Elena revisited the hospital with a severe condition which caused the doctors to immediately admit her to the emergency room after analyzing her blood pressure which was incredibly low (hypotension) and could lead to severe heart failure and pregnancy failure (Aremu, PharmD, 2021). After a thorough investigation, it was reported that even though the correct dose, the wrong dose intake impacted her life and pregnancy severely as the dose was prescribed to her two times a day. Due to the increased and wrong dose of the correct drug, the patient experiences adverse effects, which lead to a life-threatening situation. The investigation shows that this medication error was caused due to miscommunication and carelessness of nursing staff regarding double checking the dose amount due to their exhausted work routine.    

Factors Contributing to Risks Concerning Patient Safety 

This incident indicates the nurse’s carelessness and miscommunication factor that pertained to medication administration errors, and many researchers also emphasize these risk factors that highly contribute to such errors (Jacobson, 2021). The poor communication between patients and health providers and the low health literacy of patients also play an essential role in contributing to such events (PharmD, BCPS, et al., 2021). These factors have high severity and potential to harm the patients and cause them life-threatening events. Furthermore, due to nurses’ carelessness, patients suffer the most as they need to get hospitalized for a longer time, bear the extra medical expenses, and deal with health severity (Tsegaye et al., 2020). Patient safety is the primary concern of healthcare settings where health staff and interdisciplinary teams combined work to help produce effective patient results. 

Elena suffers a life-threatening situation because of the nurse’s negligence and carelessness regarding not attending patient safely. In Elena’s critical condition, stemming from the nurse’s lapses in patient safety, NURS FPX4020 Assessment 1 focuses on Enhancing Quality & Safety. Nurses did not double-check the prescribed dose of the drug by doctors and informed the patient randomly, which impacted her pregnancy as well. In this situation, miscommunication or poor communication also contributed because collaboration among health staff seems to be poor in healthcare settings (Schroers et al., 2020). Due to this, nurses did not bother to double-check or communicate with doctors again regarding the prescription of doses. Furthermore, the poor medication literacy among nurses also contributed as they did not focus on the increased amount of drugs which is experimented to be safe if normal or low amount prescribed duri