Medication Administration Errors Essay

Drug management is a complicated and time-consuming task in today's fast paced medical field. About one third of nurses are taking medicine. Due to the complexity of the drug management process, there are plenty of possibilities of mistake. They are responsible for drug management mistakes (MAE), as nurses are actually the last patients to actually administer medication to patients. MAE's reasons may include personal, organizational or systematic factors. In this article, I will explain the root cause analysis of MAE and the strategy to prevent it.

These nurses may not have the skills necessary to predict team members' needs. In addition, they may not have learned how to cooperate, take communication, and integrate care. Furthermore, they can not rate and coordinate their actions, they can not give or receive feedback. They do not use their knowledge and critical thinking to understand the current situation and behavior. Other factors may also be caused by lack of awareness of errors, lack of motivation to report errors, memory errors, poor communication skills, lack of patient knowledge, patient diagnosis, and drug names, purposes, (Carlton & Blegen, 2006).

In this case, the nurse did not check the correct adult dose of methadone using his knowledge. Methadone is an anesthetic analgesic resembling morphine (Hodgson, 2011). When managing drugs, someone has to sign the MAR form and check with them (using 5 rights). When she took methadone, the nurse could not use her critical thinking. If she is a trained nurse, she will soon notice a dose problem. There is a big difference between milliliter and milligram

Mistakes in medication treatment are the biggest mistakes in health care (Centers for Disease Control, 2013). Safe and accurate drug management is an important and potentially challenging responsibility for care. Medication requires excellent decision-making skills and clinical judgment, and the nurse is responsible for thoroughly understanding drug management and its patient's safety impact. Memory loss is caused by lack of attention, fatigue, and distraction. Errors are often called attention behaviors, lack of training and knowledge is the cause of errors. Slip causes most errors in health care. If possible, follow the list of standard procedures for each patient

Errors can occur at any stage of the drug administration process. Most errors occur during the treatment of a doctor's instruction or during the administration of actual medication. As the doctor 's instructions gave me lots of comments, most errors were discovered before the patient actually received the medication. However, doctors are in charge of final confirmation before administration.

Background: Patient medication is part of clinical practice, and there is a high risk of error. The cause of medication errors is personal or systemic. In order to prevent the occurrence of errors, it is important to establish protection measures. Purpose: To investigate protective measures taken by nurses at the clinical site to prevent dosage errors. Methods and materials: Search documents issued between January 2000 and August 2011 with Medline, Science Direct and Cochrane Library. RESULTS: Protective measures against missed dosing were associated with drug preparation and management, and dose calculation techniques. Changes in health system problems related to nurse, nursing education, oral drug order, interdisciplinary collaboration, management care, and drug management