NUR-630 Performance Improvement and Quality in Health Care

Performance Improvement and Quality in Health Care
Name
Institution
Introduction
From the nursing sector's various patient safety concerns, medication errors are one of the most common. The issue involves patients getting the wrong prescription of drugs, the wrong dosage of medication, or a combination of medications that do not interact well within the patient's body or to the disease that the patient ails from. The causes of such issues may be due to slips in the documentation of other errors caused humanly. The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) suggests that over 30,000 cases of such issues have been reported since 1992. The reporting of such cases is done voluntarily; therefore, the exact number of these cases might be higher than the estimated.
Medication errors being a common patient safety concern, it is still associated with several challenges. Most of the known cases that result in medication errors involve; misinterpretation of abbreviations used during the medication prescription; poor communication between the doctors and the nurses under care; poor communication between the doctors themselves before prescribing the medications; and drug names that have names that sound alike or medications that have the same appearance (Rodziewicz & Hipskind, 2020). Other known types of medication errors involve omission, an improper dosage of medication, unauthorized drug prescription, wrong timing of medication intake, and wrong prescription.
Addressing issues on medication errors will involve proper implementation of PI, research, and EBP. One of the most critical duties that nurses face is giving medicine to their patients because patient outcomes rely on the kind of medicine they take. Therefore, cases that involve medication errors may result in unintentional mistakes that may prove fatal to the patient, thus resulting in serious consequences. According to research, medication errors can result in adverse outcomes like increased mortality, a prolonged stay of patients in hospitals, and increased cost of their medical care. Extreme consequences that physicians may face after medication errors may include loss of trust, criminal charges, civil actions, and are likely to face medical board discipline.
Addressing medication error issues involves the implementation of strategies that will ensure patient outcomes. It is also important for nurses to familiarize themselves with these strategies to reduce or avert the likelihood of medication errors issues. One of the proposed strategies involves ensuring following the appropriate medication reconciliation procedures. Health institutions should embrace medication reconciliation mechanisms when a patient is being transferred from one institution to another or from one unit to the other in a different institution. Every medication prescribed to the patient must be verified and reviewed to ensure that the patient has the correct medicine, correct dosage, precise medication intake time, and correct route.
Secondly, it is also important to make sure that the five rights of medication are administered. Such will involve nurses ensuring that the institution's policies that abide by medication transcription are adhered to. Normally, it is not adequate to transcribe medicat...