MEDICATION ERRORS Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 1

MEDICATION ERRORS - Essay Example The aim of medication is to alleviate a patient from his/her illness and improve his quality of life. Many risks are associated with providing drug therapy as mistakes can result in the lose life or adverse effects on the patient’s health. Hospitals should organize their systems for producing, dispensing and administering medications to reduce the probability of medication errors. Errors can occur at different stages of the system, either in the pharmaceutical company, the hospital, the practitioner, the nurse or even the patient. The hospital can implement formulary systems, whereby the doctors, nurses, patients and pharmacists form societies that evaluate previous medication errors and formulate principles to annihilate the reoccurrence of such mistakes. Charting systems can be used to reduce the amount of medication errors. These systems can be combined with a decision support feature which will helps detect any inconsistencies in the diagnosis. These systems should also be in the form of real time entry; this allows the next nurse to be up to date with the treatment. Independent double checks can also be carried out before a drug is administered to the patient. This process involves two nurses verifying the drug diagnosed to a patient by ensuring it coincides with his medical condition (Whitehead, 2012). This method detects and helps avoid errors at the point of care. However, when the nurses are under stressful working conditions, the double check method has a failure rate of 20% and some errors are undetected. Drugs which have serious adverse effects when administered incorrectly should be placed on high alert. More caution should be taken when prescribing these drugs and they should be double checked with higher caution. Information technology can also be used to try and prevent the number of medication errors. Bar medication administration has also been introduced to reduce the amount of medication errors