NURS FPX6004 Assessment 3 Policy Proposal Presentation

Policy Proposal Presentation

Hello everyone, my name is [Student Name]  and today the topic of my presentation is policy proposal for avoiding medication errors. This is to propose a policy and guidelines to encourage safe medication administration for health care facilities. This is extremely vital to improve the quality of care provided for the patients. I will also be analyzing the stakeholders of this policy and how this policy will have an impact on their work and outcome. The presentation will outline the ways to implement different strategies related to policy, determining its scope to preventing medication errors, and will also outline the importance of recognizing such errors as they cause severe consequences to patients yearly. 

Proposed Organizational Policy & Practice Guidelines

Medication errors tend to be life-threatening for the patients, they increase the duration of the stay and even increase the cost. The health care workers are always under great stress due to the rising number of cases of medication errors. With proper communication, all of this can be avoided. The policies and the guidelines that will be followed should always comply with the laws. The policies will be following the ASHP guidelines that comply with the federal laws and have proven to be effective. 

The new policy of the hospital would be to come up with a multidisciplinary medication safety team. Nurses need to act professionally while they comply with the policies. According to the ASHP guidelines, such teams should have a leader, that will most preferably be a pharmacist. All the past medication errors and gaps will be analyzed to point to the areas of risk so those can be improved. (Billstein-Leber et al.,2018). Medications with high risk would be identified and the nurses would be educated and trained on recognizing and using them. Nurses must take help from all the resources available.

All the drugs should be packaged and labeled correctly, even the syringes should be labeled. With such a multidisciplinary team the flow of communication will be smoother, and double-checking would become a mandatory behavior instead of voluntary. The analysis of the medications needs to be continued even after it has been prescribed. According to this new policy, technology should intervene for safe medication administration. When the patient is admitted, there would be a standardized procedure of reviewing the patient’s history from the system and entering all the new symptoms and current situation. The system help identify any allergies or problems that a patient has reported before so changes could be made, and the best medication can be prescribed. Prescriptions would be printed so no error occurs due to illegible writing.

According to the ASHP guidelines, automated dispensing cabinets (ADC), should be use after being configured for remote usage. All health professionals must be trained to use the ADC more effectively. ADCs should also be maintained and optimized for safer usage. There should be decisions to enhance, and make it safer, and more efficient for the future to improve ADC (Cello et al.,2021).  ASHP also encourages the usage of bar-code-enabled medication administration. This would involve the pharmacists to design this system that would achieve patient safety by administering the right medication according to patients’ identifier that stores all the critical knowledge about them. The scanners would scan the identifier tags and then scan the medication to make sure that the medication fits the patient’s diagnosis and situation (ASHP,2009).

Relevant Benchmark That Illustrates the Need for a Policy

With thousands of prescriptions being made year after year, the United States alone reports the death of 7,000 to 9,000 people each year due to medication errors. There are thousands of other patients who experience medication errors, but these are often not reported. And the patients who face harm and are then made to stay in the hospital further, the cost of the stays and treatment exceeds $40 billion each year (Tariq et al.,2022). The dissatisfaction and the lack of trust that grows in patients put the health care facilities and the patient themselves at a disadvantage. Such increased costs and consequences emphasize the need for a changed policy and better implementation of that policy to avoid medication errors because even though such errors are deadly, they are never impossible to avoid. <