Investigating and understanding the situation is necessary to determine which factors pertain to medication administration errors. Firstly, it is necessary to arrange training sessions for nursing staff and highlight the guidelines and best clinical practices to avoid medication administration errors and attain quality treatment (M. Tidman DHSc, & Khan, 2022). Training is necessary and required for patient safety and positive patient outcomes in healthcare settings because nurses communicate primarily with patients and doctors as they work as a bridge between them. Therefore, they must be aware of guidelines, limitations, and best practices.
As per Elena’s case, nurses have low health literacy, making them not realize the high dose for pregnant patients, directly impacting patient safety (M. Tidman DHSc, & Khan, 2022). According to Bengtsson et al. (2021), medication errors are linked with an interruption in work that represents the nurse’s carelessness and negligence (Bengtsson et al., 2021). Therefore, reducing interruptions and providing a safe treatment environment to patients require guiding the nurses about the severity of their minor events. Similarly, Tsegaye et al. (2020) emphasized that improving communication among healthcare staff can also positively influence mitigating the chance of medication administration errors. When nurses have high participation in communicating with health practitioners regarding prescribing, analyzing, and monitoring, there is a low probability of attempting medication administration errors (Tsegaye et al., 2020). Therefore, improving communication between health staff and patients can lead to attaining patient safety and satisfaction (Tsegaye et al., 2020).
In addition, to reduce patient harm through medication errors, nurses must double-check the dose amount before prescribing. According to Elena’s case, due to not double-checking the prescribed amount, Elena had to go through tough decisions and conditions. Koyama et al. (2019) also agreed over this initiative that double-checking high-risk drugs increases the effectiveness of treatment delivery and contributes to the patient’s quality safety (Koyama et al., 2019). Furthermore, with this initiative, nurses can save themselves from being involved in harsh decisions and not causing extended hospital stays, high costs, expenditures, and guilt for patients with severe conditions (Koyama et al., 2019).
For this purpose, the Barcode Medication Administration (BCMA) intervention should be utilized by hospitals to maintain their quality delivery standard and minimize human errors (Zheng et al., 2020). This is proved by evidence-based studies that BCMA reduced the ratio of medication administration errors by 43.5% in the United States (Thompson et al., 2018). The nurses can provide medication through this advanced recognition system that alerts them regarding high doses or wrong doses to the wrong patients. This tool provides quality safety treatment and alerts the nurses regarding high-risk situations beforehand, which positively impacts the reduction of medication administration errors (Thompson et al., 2018).
Order this paper