Medication error reduction - Essay Example

Patient Safety Recommendations Number and Number Number of Words: 272 To protect the patients from the adverse effects of medication errors, health professionals such as in the case of nurses should strictly follow the five rights to the administration of drugs. These five rights includes: (1) right drug; (2) right dose; (3) right route (i.e. intravenous, intradermal, subcutaneous, oral, etc.); (4) right time; and (5) right patient (Benjamin, 2003). According to Benjamin (2003), medication errors can take place due to error of omission – inability of nurses to act correctly or error of commission – when nurses acted incorrectly.

To avoid medication errors, health care professionals should avoid system errors related to oral or written miscommunications. Through the use of computerization program, health professionals could effectively reduce cases of adverse drug reactions due to medication errors (Walsh et al., 2008). Since the use of computerization enables the physician to encode drug name, dosage, time of administration and route under specific patient name, nurses could easily avoid administering wrong medication due to sloppy handwritten physician’s prescription.

Aside from promoting social interaction between the health care professionals and patients (Benjamin, 2003), nurses should make it a habit to clearly indicate in the patients’ medication card each time the drug has been administered to the patients. Before administering drugs to patient, nurses should ask for the patient’s name to ensure that the nurse is communicating with the right patient (Grissinger & Kelly, 2005). Eventually, nurses should inform the patient about the drug name and its uses followed by clearly recording the exact time of drug administration in patient’s medication card.

By doing so, health care professionals can avoid double administration of medication especially among the bedridden patients. *** End ***ReferencesBenjamin, D. (2003). Reducing medication errors and increasing patient safety: case studies in clinical pharmacology. Journal of clinical Pharmacology , 43(7):768-783.Grissinger, M., & Kelly, K. (2005). Reducing the risk of medication errors in women. Journal of Womens Health , 14(1):61-67.Walsh, K., Landrigan, C., Adams, W., Vinci, R., Chessare, J.

, Cooper, M., et al. (2008). Effect of computer order entry on prevention of serious medication errors in hospitalized children. Pediatrics , 121(3):e421-e427.