Carrie Minton
HCS/482
March 16, 2015
Eric Rios
Adverse Trend & Data Management An adverse trend in the health care system is a serious event causing harm to patients as a result of inadequate medical care. A trend is a consistent and pressing issue that needs to be addressed. Trending adverse events indicate that the care given is resulting in an undesirable patient outcome. An important adverse trend that is addressed in this paper is medication errors. MEDMARX is a nationally recognized, web-based, anonymous, and voluntary medication error reporting system (Rashidee, Hart, Chen, & Kumar, 2009). Healthcare facilities use this reporting system to report medication error data. Within a three …show more content…
Any kind of error, whether it causes no harm to the patient or kills the patient, is still an error that needs to be reported and addressed. This collection of data begins with looking at the CPOE (electronic physician orders), Pyxis dispense history, eMAR, narcotic waste history (if a narcotic error), barcode scans, and the stage that the error occurred. These are all important data pieces to collect and analyze in order to pain the picture of what happened and why. The stages of where/when the error occurred are very important for identifying patient harm. Stage one is considered a prescribing error where the incorrect drug or dose is selected for a patient. This kind of error is also the cause of illegible handwriting and/or the misspelling of a drug with a similar name (Williams, 2007). Prescription errors make up for between 1-11% of all written prescriptions (Sanders & Esmail, 2003). Stage two is where dispensing errors occur. This is considered to be selection of the wrong product where usually there are look alike and sound alike drugs involved such as Losec and Lasix. Step three and four are the preparation and administering stages and the rates of these errors vary between 3.5% and 49% (NPSA, 2007). These stages are areas of high risk within nursing practice where nurses fail to verify important information such as drug, patient, dose, time, and route (Williams, 2007). IV drugs are suggested to be as high as 25% of medication errors in these stages (Bruce & Wong, 2001). Stage five is errors in monitoring outcome. Patients take certain drugs that require continuous monitoring to ensure the dosing is correct and there are no adverse