Medication Errors In Health Care

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Medication Errors
This eye-opening statistic for the prevalence of medication errors displays the negative outcome of avoidable mistakes in the health-care profession: “researchers estimated that potentially preventable adverse drug events kill 7,000 Americans annually and that medication errors that result in harm are the number-one cause of inpatient fatalities” (Anderson, 2010). Medication errors are preventable mistakes that are frequent in health-care settings, therefor striving to improve this issue in health-care is a critical step to ensure patient safety. A medication error is defined as “any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm while the medication is in the control of the healthcare …show more content…
This meaning that there was an error in administering because of one of the following five reasons not being correct: the right patient, the right time, the right dose, the right medication, and the right route. The next barrier that may cause a medication error is inadequate knowledge of medication or technology by nurses. Technology has been greatly improved to try and prevent complications with medication error; however, nurses must still understand how medication affects patients as well as how this new technology works. Nurses are the ones who administer most medications, therefore, they are the one’s who have the final opportunity to prevent a medication error from happening. With this being said nurses are the one’s who are using the barcoding system before administering medication. In order for success with this technology, “educating nurses on how to use the BCMA technology is a top priority. Nurses’ understanding of how BCMA works and their level of comfort with the technology are crucial in incorporation the BCMA in nursing practice” (Keane, 2014). This new technology is helpful as long as nurses …show more content…
Agyemang et While (2010) focused on different kinds of medication errors and then elaborated on the causes of why these medication errors may be occurring. They strongly emphasized the safety of ensuring prescription and administration methods are correct by using the five rights of medication. Similar to Agymand et While (2010) the five rights of medication were also discussed by Keane (2014). She showed a different aspect of the five rights by focusing on barcoding and how its main purpose is to check the five rights to prevent medication errors. It is also discussed in this source that adequate education is involved in ensuring safety of patients while utilizing the barcoding system. Nazarko (2015) also stressed the importance of the five rights in order to eliminate errors when administering medication. This source was differentiated from the others by specifically talking about residents in care homes and the safety implications that should be implemented to reduce errors in this particular setting. This was more specific than the other sources because they focused on a broad spectrum of patients rather than just the elderly in care
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