Improvement Plan Tool Kit
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Improvement Plan Tool Kit
Introduction
This improvement plan tool kit aims to enable nurses to implement and ensure safety improvement measures in health care settings during drug administration. It is organized into three categories, each containing three to five annotated sources. The categories include; a general overview of medication errors, especially medication errors occurring during medication administration and their impacts, contributing factors to such errors, the strategies necessary to address the medication errors during drugs administration, and the significance of addressing the errors.
Annotated Bibliography
General Overview of Medication (Administration) Errors and Their Impacts
Feleke, S. A., Mulatu, M. A., & Yesmaw, Y. S. (2015). Medication administration error: magnitude and associated factors among nurses in Ethiopia. BMC nursing, 14(1), 1-8.
This article describes the effects of medication errors on the outcome of the patients. These include; increased mortality, morbidity, increased hospital stay, and high healthcare costs. It further highlights the importance of appropriately understanding these impacts on improving the quality of care to the patients. Besides, the article elaborates the various factors associated with medication administration errors, outlining documentation errors as the commonest cause. Other possible causes of such errors include; inadequate staffing and various forms of interruptions during drug administration. This article is resourceful to the nurses since it provides a better understanding of the medication errors and their various impacts, thus the need to prevent them from occurring.
Sterling, V. (2018). Minimizing medication errors in pediatric patients. US Pharm, 44(4), 20-23.
This article primarily addresses medication errors as most common among pediatric patients. Dosing errors are described as the most common cause of such errors due to several other factors. These include; poor understanding of the appropriate dosage for the neonates and children since they have a different response to drugs than adults. It further explains the other causes of these errors: illegible prescriptions, abbreviations in prescriptions, language barriers, and lack of communication skills, tiredness, and multiple drug combinations. Besides, the article explains the roles of various personnel involved in intercepting such errors and preventing them from occurring to prevent the associated adverse effects. The information provided in the article is relevant to the nurses since they can understand what is required of them to help minimize and prevent such errors.
World Health Organization. (2016). Medication errors.
This article provides general information related to medication errors. Firstly, it describes the various events and factors which can lead to medication errors. The events outlined include; professional practice, health care products, procedures, and the systems. As highlighted by the article, the other factors that contribute to such errors include errors during prescribing, order communication, product labeling, packaging, and nomenclature, compounding, dispensing, distribution, administration, education, monitoring, and use. The article also explains how these errors affect the patients’ health outcomes and also other stakeholders involved. It is a very resourceful article for the nurses since they can learn more related to such medication errors, especially their causes and the various impacts such errors have on the stakeholders in healthcare.
Factors Contributing to the Errors
Bolandianbafghi, S., Salimi, T., Rassouli, M., Faraji, R., & Sarebanhassanabadi, M. (2017). Correlation between medication errors with job satisfaction and fatigue of nurses. Electronic physician, 9(8), 5142.
This article highlights how nurse-related factors such as fatigue, burnout, and job dissatisfaction are associated with the occurrences of medication errors. The article describes these factors as the leading causes of medication errors that the nurses cause. Inadequate staffing has been described as the leading cause of overworking of the available few nurses, leading to burnout and fatigue. Fatigue, in turn, leads to job dissatisfaction which is associated with decreased performance levels. Reports provided by the article indicate that the exhausted and unsatisfied nurses recorded increased incidences of medication administration errors and the aged nurses. This article is critical for the nurses as they can understand how their fatigue can have adverse effects on the outcomes of the patient as it can lead to increased incidences of medication errors. Therefore, they can