Medication Errors
One of the most common quality issues pertaining to medication administration in the healthcare setting is medication error. Despite the increasing prevalence of medication errors, it’s preventable through quality improvement interventions. Medication error is any preventable event resulting from inappropriate use of medication, which may or may not results in patient harm while under the care of a health care professional. Medication error results from a failure in one or more of the five rights of medication. The five rights include medication, time, route, right patient, and dosage (Hammoudi et al., 2018). Modern healthcare delivery systems have continued to evolve, and emphasis has been placed on system design complementing the medication administration process. Unfortunately, system design has contributed to medical administration errors through inadequate training of healthcare providers, convoluted processes, distractors, and system misconfiguration.
Despite the invention of various technologies aimed at promoting better healthcare delivery, medication errors remain prevalent in the US (Tsegaye et al., 2020). A significant portion of the medication errors occurs to hospitalized children due to the difficulty of weight-based pediatric dosing, where dosage depends on calculations of weight and height. The variability in weight calculations increases the risk of wrong dosage administration. The most common medication errors are missing doses, wrong dosage, and wrong medication. The most significant causes of these errors include poor health provider and patient communication, lack of health literacy among patients, shortage of healthcare providers, and poorly developed medication safety protocol. To resolve this quality issue, evidence-based interventions should focus on mitigating the cayuses.
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