NURS FPX 4020 Assessment 1 – Enhancing Quality and Safety
NURS FPX 4020 Assessment 1
Name
Capella University
Capella 4020 Assessment 1
May 2023
NURS FPX 4020 Assessment 1
Enhancing Quality and Safety
Globally, medication mistake errors are of the main consideration in healthcare settings. At any stage of treatment, prescription and administration, these medication errors can occur which have adverse consequences on patient’s health results. Across the US, medication mistakes are the major problem which kill one person and injure 1.5 million individuals yearly (Aseeri et al., 2020). Research studies have validated that medication mistakes rank third among leading causes of deaths after cancer and cardiovascular diseases (Rasool et al., 2020).
Healthcare workers have a key responsibility of these medication mistakes. This issue is critical depending on various factors and making every stakeholder responsible. The multiple organizational factors might be poor communication, inadequate training, mistaken documentation, data gaps and technological barriers. Whereas, patient’s parameters causing medication mistakes are insufficient health awareness, compliance and wrong self-prescriptions. There is a need of multi-aspect strategies for handling the medication mistakes. This strategy will require strong communication and collaboration among patients, doctors, healthcare providers, nurses, administrators and other related stakeholders. Moreover, for enhancement of patient’s safety, sufficient training, assessment and evaluation are important.
Scenario for Medication Errors
A 50-year old man reported chest tightness, pain and breath shortness due to which he was hospitalized. His medical history showed that he has hypertension and increased cholesterol. The preliminary identification revealed that he had a blocked heart artery which needed angioplasty. The angioplasty surgery was planned for the very next day. He was prescribed medicines for blood thinning and analgesics to control the present condition. That man was allergic to one of the medicines but this fact was missed out by the nurse who was checking his medical and medication history.
Consequently, patient suffered from a severe allergic reaction which caused breathing discomfort and throat swelling. The healthcare staff right away handled the situation by giving the patient an antidote for the allergic response. The patient got stabilized and normal but there was a higher probability of complications due to medication mistake. This careless and irresponsible event was reported to the organization’s administration. It immediately formed an investigation committee for finding the root cause of medication mistake and to avoid such events to occur in future again.
Factors Leading to Patient Safety Risk
Medication mistakes put patient on high safety risk and threaten his life. These errors can occur at any phase of the medication procedure such as diagnosis, prescription, transcription, purchasing and administration (Tariq & Scherbak, 2023). Various factors which are linked with medication errors are insufficient health education, poor training, disproportionate staffing, extreme work burden, time constraints, non-compliance with the medical standards, poor communication among healthcare workers, departments and patients and inappropriate evaluation (Suzuki et al., 2022). These aspects can increase the probability of medication mistakes and can accelerate bad drug incidents, high healthcare expenditures and decreased patient contentedness.
In this incident, patient could have suffered the severe implications due to medication mistake which led to adverse allergic reaction. If it was not dealt immediately, this could increase the disease complications for the patient. The possible factors for this medication mistakes are non-compliance to double checking methodology, inadequate training and poor communication. Patient’s medical and medication history was not read properly by the respective nurse which is an important stage in patient safety interventions. Moreover, the healthcare organization might not have an appropriate medication error prevention system i.e., barcodes and digital data entry.
NURS FPX 4020 Assessment 1
Solutions Based on Evidence-based Best Practices
The main objective of the healthcare workers is giving prime priority to patient’s safety. Medication mistakes can be decreased significantly by using evidence-based solution and best medical practices. Electronic Medication Administration results (eMARs) is one of the potential solutions. It can reduce the probability of medication mistakes by ensuring instant access to updated patient’s medical history and decreasing the misinterpretation errors of manual pres
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