As a nurse, the safety of a patient is one of the essential elements in ensuring quality care. However, that can deem difficult with a nation's health care system that is flawed and prone to errors. Yet, it is still the duty of the nurse to verify that patient care is delivered safely and no harm comes to patient. One area of treatment that requires nurses to ensure care is safely administered is during chemotherapy. Cancer is still one of the most deadly killers of mankind today with still no cure for it. However, treatments such chemotherapy help with the removal of cancer cells in the body but there can be errors that could affect patient safety if the chemotherapy drug is not administered properly. …show more content…
18). Though the duties for ensuring patient safety is allocated amongst different healthcare professionals, this paper will focus solely on nurses’ responsibility in improving patient safety and identifying chemotherapy errors.
According to author Becze (2016), there has not been much proof of any other related chemotherapy oversights (pg. 19). She further explains how studies propose that these chemotherapy mistakes have been due to authorization of drugs by prescriber (pg.19). In addition, she mentions data conducted that shows evidence of “near miss events’ that occurred from January 2009 to December 2015 due to prescribing errors such as “incorrect dose, wrong frequency or day of treatment, wrong drug, incomplete order, or protocol deviation” (Becze, 2016, p. 19). Hence, after the chemotherapy overdose resulting in a patient's death many cancer centers began to implement tactics that would prevent any further chemotherapy errors. These tactics to control chemotherapy mistakes needed the use of advanced computer systems and improved communications. However, just like any other technology system, the computer systems needed to be updated