Medication Error

introduction More people die each year in United States from medication errors, than from highway accident, breast cancer or AIDS. It is described best as an “unintended act or as an act that does not achieve its intended outcome.” (Wideman, 2010). Medication errors are among the biggest issues devoted in health care setting today in America. There are five “rights” to remember when administering medications: Right patient, Right medication, Right route, Right dose, and Right time. Documentation has been added as the sixth “right”. Poor transcriptions, drug interactions, drug name confuse, and poor documentation account for majority of the most common errors. Literature Review This study will show that there is a complex procedure behind the simple act of medication administration. Many studies have been done to identify the breaks in this procedure leading to medication errors. Nurses are the last defense before a medication is administered to the patient. Human factors such as fatigue in this fast moving economy play a large role in failure to adhere to the correct procedures leading to errors in medication administration. Technological advancements have been put in place in an effort to reduce the occurrences of medication errors such as Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE), electronic Medical Administration Records (eMAR) and Barcode scanning. Nurses are also getting more education in the drug interactions and the correct dosages to question correctly when an order is being entered into a patient’s chart.
Medication Errors – Implication for Nursing Practice Medication errors can be caused by orders from the doctors and misunderstood by nurses due to poor concentrations caused by increased workload, fatigue and distractions from personal lives. In addition, errors are caused by misreading, miswriting and misunderstanding the prescriptions. There are occasions where verbal/telephone must be taken, the nurse taking the order should

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