In recent times, there have been concerns regarding patient safety while in the care environment since patients are exposed to various hazards and events that can endanger their lives and also reduce patient satisfaction. Bodies like the World Health Organization have made several efforts to improve patient safety, and therefore, patient safety is being used as the fundamental care quality dimension (Mieiro et al., 2019). One of such concerns is medication errors which have largely been referred to as any preventable event that can lead to or cause an inappropriate use of medication or patient harm while the medication is the control of the consumer, patient, or healthcare professional. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to formulate an annotated bibliography on medication errors and the current efforts to address the situation.
As a professional, I believe in the safety of patients and that patients need to be satisfied with the nature or kind of patient care offered in the care setting. The implication is that the nurses and other healthcare professionals need to do their absolute best in ensuring that the patient gets the best. This topic is of interest since medication errors are largely preventable. Recent findings indicate that medication error is among the primary causes of patient mortality and morbidity and that in the USA alone, medication errors cause up to 7,000 deaths every single year while also leading to substantial intangible and tangible costs (Mieiro et al., 2019). Therefore, efforts are needed to explore more robust strategies to control and prevent medication errors. I have had a professional experience with medication errors, where a former staff member was involved in a medication error involving preparation and dispensing leading to medication overdose. The error negatively impacted the Patient’s life and had to be admitted to the emergency department to help negate the impacts of the overdose. The facility was later served with litigation papers followed by a costly court case.
The annotated bibliography was created after conducting a comprehensive literature search from various databases. The following databases were searched using relevant keywords; Google Scholar was used as one of the search sites in addition to other important databases such as TRIP database, Cochrane Library, Dynamed, PubMed, and CINHAL.
Huckels-Baumgart, S., Baumgart, A., Buschmann, U., Schüpfer, G., & Manser, T. (2021). Separate medication preparation rooms reduce interruptions and medication errors in the hospital setting: a prospective observational study. Journal of patient safety, 17(3), e161-e168. https://doi.org/10.1097/PTS.0000000000000335
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ThiIS article by Huckels-Bumgart et al. (2021) was written with the major aim of examining the impact of using separate medication rooms on the interruptions when preparing medications and on the rates of self-reported medication errors. This article has been included as part of the annotated bibliography because it is peer-reviewed and explores one of the interventions addressing medication errors. The intervention explored was preparing medications in separate rooms to address the problem of distractions which have been shown to cause medication errors. The researchers used a pre-and post-intervention study directly observing nurses during medication preparation (Huckels-Bumgart et al., 2021). The study took 122 days where a total of forty-two nurses were recruited to participate in the study, and they prepared one thousand four hundred and ninety-eight medications. During the time of the study, a total of two hundred and eight medication errors were reported. Upon the use of separate rooms for preparation, the researchers noted that the rates of interruptions significantly reduced for fifty-two to thirty per hour while the preparation free of interruption substantially increased to 2.5 minutes from 1.4 minutes (Huckels-Bumgart et al., 2021). Worth noting is that there was a significant drop in medication error rates per day as only 0.9 errors per day were observed as compared to 1.3 errors observed before the intervention. This study, therefore, showed that the use of separate medication preparation rooms significantly decreased cases of medication errors.
Lance, S., Travers, J., & Bourke, D. (2021). Reducing medication errors for hospital inpatients with Parkinsonism. Internal medicine journal, 51(3), 385-389.&nb
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