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Identifying Opportunities To Reduce Medication Errors In Tertiary Healthcare Settings Essay

Addressing Complex Issues in Healthcare Settings

Addressing Complex Issues in Healthcare

At present, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration receives more than 400,000 reports concerning drug-related medication errors in the United States each year (Medication error statistics, 2022). Many of these medication errors result in serious patient harm, including death (Jin et al., 2022). Although the causes of medication errors vary, miscommunications among nursing staff represent one of the major sources today and many of these preventable errors will continue to occur unless and until nurses and other healthcare practitioners follow hospital protocols when administering medications.

Healthcare Professionals Needed to Make a Positive Change

An interdisciplinary team comprised of a doctor of nursing practice (DNP) representative from nursing services as well as representatives from pharmacy and information resource management (IRM) to identify the specific causes and sources of medication errors, including responsible individual, shift, and ward and track them over time to identify opportunities to reduce error rates. In addition, the nursing leader should facilitate collaboration between team members to ensure that medication incident reports from all services are submitted in a timely and transparent fashion, the pharmacy leader should provide examples of similar-sounding medication names and the issues involved in ensuring timely prescription refills, and the IRM representative should provide the trending support that is needed for the trending the medication...

…safe medication practices and forging a collaborative medication administration policy (Sim & Joyner, 2012). In addition, a patient-centered and relationship-based approach to addressing medication errors should also include a number of quick fixes that generate momentum and provide some immediate successes (Sim & Joyner. 2012, p. 403).

In Summary

The sources of medication errors are multiple, but the vast majority of them are caused by human mistakes, most commonly by nursing staff but by other healthcare practitioners as well. By making the reduction of medication errors a priority and assembling a multidisciplinary team to identify appropriate strategies for this purpose, DNPs can make a substantive difference in the quality of care that…

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References

Jin, H., Xiao, Z., Li, M., Fu, Q., & Duffy, V. G. (2022). How do medication errors occur in the nursing communication process? Investigating the relationship between error types and error factors. Work, 1–13.

López, M. I. M., Sáchez, G. I., García, F. F. P., & Pancorbo, H. P. L. (2022). Nurses and ward managers’ perceptions of leadership in the evidence?based practice: A qualitative study. Journal of Nursing Management, 30(1), 135–143.

Medication error statistics. (2022). SingleCare. Retrieved from https://www.singlecare. com/blog/news/medication-errors-statistics/#:~:text=How%20many%20medication %20errors%20occur,year%20because%20of%20medication%20errors.

Sim, T. A., & Joyner, J. (2012). A multidisciplinary team approach to reducing medication variance. The Joint Commission Journal on Quality Improvement, 28(7), 403–409.

The Essentials of Doctoral Education for Advanced Nursing Practice. (2006, October). American Association of Colleges of Nursing. Retrieved from https://www.aacnnursing.org/Portals/ 42/Publications/DNPEssentials.pdf.

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