Nurses Role In Preventing Medication Error

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Threats to patient safety are major concerns for nurses and one preventable threat to patient safety is medication error. Research by Härkänen, Turunen, Saano and Vehviläinen-Julkunen (2015) proves that 90 to 95 percent of medication errors result in no patient harm, however there is a percentage of errors that harm patients and need to be prevented. To further the prevention of medication errors, nurses need to catch errors during the medication process, to correctly identify the cause of errors, and to properly report medication errors.
An important part in preventing medication errors is catching the errors when they occur. Medication errors can occur during the medication process when the nurse prepares the medication, when the nurse administers the medication, or when the nurse observes the patient after medication administration. According to Härkänen et al. (2015), medication errors occur in the documentation and reading the documentation of medications, like medication orders, during medication …show more content…
Güneş, Gürlek and Sönmez (2014) state that the error-reporting systems that hospitals use, needs to improve their error-reporting to account for and document all medical errors. Nurses need to take the responsibility to report any errors that might occur during the medication process in order to further prevent harm to the patient. Härkänen et al. (2015) agrees that properly reporting information on errors, helps health-care workers to learn and to improve from medication errors of the past. Correcting past mistakes in reporting and learning from these errors to helps to improve reporting skills and assists in further medication error prevention.
In conclusion, medication errors are preventable as long as there are nurses who catch errors during the medication process, those who correctly identify the cause of errors, and those who properly report these

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