Reducing Errors in Chemotherapy Administration. What is the Issue?

Reducing Errors in Chemotherapy Administration
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Reducing Errors in Chemotherapy Administration
What is the Issue?
The concern is the level of precautions in administering cancer treatment, especially because it involves high-risk drugs and immunocompromised patients. Therefore, it is essential to create a safety checklist to prevent errors. Introducing new methods to thoroughly crosscheck cancer treatment administration will minimize risks associated with the occurrence of errors.
Reasons for Selecting this Issue
The selection of this issue came after consideration of all errors likely to occur in chemotherapy administration procedures. It is an important issue because cancer involves high-risk drugs that require health providers’ full attention during administration. Slight errors in treatment administration can be fatal for the patient.
How the Issue affects me and my Unit’s Practice
My unit's service scope is that we admit patients above 14 years who are diagnosed with cancer for the best possible cancer therapies, including chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and targeted treatment. Besides, we provide care to patients undergoing radiotherapy, interventional radiology, and non-surgical oncology services.
How the Improvement Project Impacts Nursing Practice and Patient Outcome
Improved safety methods and procedures in chemotherapy administration will enable nurses to thoroughly review the chemo medicinal order for the patients' intake. This will facilitate faster and easier treatment administration to the patients, which will speed up their recovery process.
Current State: Policy and Procedure
Health practitioners should wear protective clothing when administering chemotherapy; only chemo-certified nurses are allowed to administer chemotherapy. Patient consent is sought before administering chemotherapy, and two qualified nurses verify the order, dose, and administration route.
The chemotherapy administration gap revealed that neither in chemo nor nursing practice rechecked the patient's previous drug reaction history before chemotherapy administration.
Current State: Practice
Physicians prescribe the chemotherapy, and primary nurses review the order and inform the pharmacy to prepare chemo medicine.
The identified gap in practice is that during chemo administration, although two nurses check the medication outside the patient room. However, they do not loudly confirm patient details and recheck the pump set with the secondary registered nurse inside the patient room, which can cause errors.
Evidence
Schwappach, Pfeiffer & Taxis (2016), in a study on the practice of double-checking procedures in chemotherapy administration and to explore nurses' experiences in the procedure, revealed that it is essential for oncology nurses to double-check as a procedure to eliminate and minimize errors.
According to Kalo et al. (2019), a study aiming at assessing the rates of chemotherapy administration errors before and after a dual-nurse chemotherapy timeout process was put into action, and the recurrence of minimized err...