| Assignment Criteria | Your Answers: (NOTE: See Milestone 1 Grading Rubric for details required in each area.) |
| Nursing Care Issue and Outcome | Nursing Care Issue: Medication Error Outcome:Improving the control over the intake of medications in medical institutions of different profiles will help to make the treatment process more perfect. Errors in the care process will be eliminated, patients will be able to quickly recover from their illnesses, and fatal cases caused by taking the wrong medicines and making mistakes will be prevented. Furthermore, the management of clinics will be able to achieve higher performance of subordinates as the dynamics of treatment will be stabilized, and the number of grateful patients will increase. In case the whole nursing staff of a particular medical institution is aware of the consequences that the issue can entail, work quality will certainly improve, and the professionalism of the staff will increase. |
| Details of the Issue | The work of junior medical personnel is often accompanied by high responsibility, especially when it is about serious cases. Quite often, patients’ health largely depends on the quality of nurses’ work, their qualifications, and professionalism. One of the issues that deserve a rather urgent intervention is medication errors when an employee makes mistakes in the administration of medicines among patients because of inattention. According to Hayes, Jackson, Davidson, and Power (2015), the most frequent mistake in prescribing a particular preparation is the wrong dosage. Then, the wrong choice of drugs comes, the purpose of the drug, errors in determining the frequency of administration, and, finally, ignoring the interaction of a particular preparation with other ones. Such mistakes in the work process are unacceptable, and correcting the situation should certainly be a priority for the management of medical clinics. Errors in administering drugs can be divided into several groups: deadly, life-threatening, serious, and non-essential (Sears, O’Brien-Pallas, Stevens, & Murphy, 2016). The time of recovery may be prolonged, and sometimes the consequences can be dangerous. In addition, complaints can come from patients who notice nursing errors, and the management of clinics is forced to conduct disruptive work with subordinates. Therefore, the issue is urgent and deserves attention. |
| Reason Issue Selected | Despite the fact that some mistakes are not too dangerous for patients’ life, treatment can become more complicated because of improper control over the intake of medications. As Sears et al. (2016) note, “around 75 percent of novice nurses commit medication errors” (p. e284). This indicator is very high; that is why the issue should be solved in order to exclude possible problems in the future. Moreover, the heads of medical departments will certainly approve of real interventions to correct the situation since most patients with complaints address specifically to them. The improvement of the situation can entail benefits not only for patients but also for nurses themselves. According to Hayes et al. (2015), frequent errors in administering medicines are inextricably linked with the insufficient level of nurses’ education and the lack of their experience. Useful interventions in correcting the situation, namely, improving the training of nurses, will make a significant contribution to the development of medicine and will help to make medical care more quality and qualified. Also, the choice of the issue is due to the need to improve the treatment of those patients who have allergic reactions to certain drugs. Lethal outcomes caused by the incompatibility of two or more preparations will be substantially reduced, and the recovery statistics will become more encouraging. Thus, appropriate training of specialists will certainly help to improve the quality of nursing care. |
References
Hayes, C., Jackson, D., Davidson, P. M., & Power, T. (2015). Medication errors in hospitals: A literature review of disruptions to nursing practice during medication administration. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 24(21-22), 3063-3076.
Sears, K., O’Brien-Pallas, L., Stevens, B., & Murphy, G. T. (2016). The relationship between nursing experience and education and the occurrence of reported pediatric medication administration errors. Journal of Pediatric Nursing, 31(4), e283-e290.