Analyzing Health Policy Letter

Health Policy Letter

The health policy being proposed

Medicines are primarily used to avert chronic ailments, infectious viruses and alleviate pain. If used incorrectly and without necessary instructions, medicines can instigate harmful outcomes in a human body.

Errors with medicine use are prone to occur at work, hospital, pharmacy and even home. Pediatric patients are often prone to experience iatrogenic injury due to underlying medication errors. Nurses are tasked with enhancing and alleviating patients from pain as opposed to contributing to it. Medication errors greatly contribute to increasing health-related risks to patients. The issue has become a global concern due to escalating medical costs, protracted hospital stays and mortality rise in rates. Averting medical errors is a key responsibility of both hospitals and governments. In order to curb medication errors, strategies implemented have ranged from using information technology, critical incident analysis and concentrated input from medical professionals (Simpson, Lynch, Grant, & Alroomi, 2004).The paper has suggested credible recommendations in order to curb medication errors occurring in healthcare settings for children. It will also deal with hygiene factor and its imperativeness in child medication.

Why action is needed

Administering medicines and apt handling is a prerequisite for effective healthcare practices for children, ensuring best methods and deliverability. During childcare hours, doctors and parents should minimize the amount of medication dosage given to a child. More so, medicine dosage twice a day should ideally be given before and after childcare hours as opposed to during childcare hours. In cases where medication is ordered thrice a day, it should be given in early morning, afternoon and in the evening. In some cases, however, administering medication in childcare hours is necessary (NTICCHCC, 2000).

Recommended course of action

Towards combating the ongoing medication administration errors, eight different forms of strategies are devised. They consist of establishing time of medication administration, non-punitive reporting and documenting allergies.

Change was primarily driven by implementing competitive leadership and relevant intervention. Failure was usually reported in the absence of these two factors, apart from clouded aims, actions, poor planning phase, lack of vision and focus on parameters involved, unneeded emphasis on collecting information, interest of just singular stakeholder, resistance from nursing staff and physicians, and lastly overlap of timing among nursing professionals.

The non-implementation of strategies can usually be a confusion of aforementioned factors contributing in inaction and below-par results. Effective implementation can be achieved by mapping out plan, strategies and implementation regime (Hughes & Blegen., 2008).

Why this health policy change is important

As per a research conducted by Cheragi et al. (2013) in 2009 at Imam Khomeini Hospital (Tehran, Iran), 237 professional nurses were interviewed. The results showed that, 64.5% of professionals were making medication errors while remainder 31.13% were unintentionally heading in erroneous direction.

Wrong dosage and infusion rate were the commonly reported errors. Heavy reliance on abbreviations usually created a void, causing errors to thrive, resulting in such cases. As majority of the errors committed are under-reported by nurses, nursing management should encourage error reporting in order to boost healthcare management facilitation and drive down costs (Cheragi, Manoocheri, Mohammadnejad, & Ehsani, 2013).

How the issue has evolved or become a concern?

Incidence of medication errors is steadily on the rise. Furthermore, numerous incidences are not reported and not accessible on records. As is the case, most medical lapses usually occur due to lack of familiarity with the adhered protocols / lack of medical procedural knowledge, similarity of medical containers and packaging causing the rates of mortality and illnesses to go up significantly.

Different pharmaceutical corporations producing same drugs with a name-change is a likely cause that increases the risk of incidences. This prevalent issue has been observed statistically worldwide as evidenced by multiple reports in recorded literature (Tobias, Yadav, Gupta, & Jain, 2013).

Who will be affected by this policy?

NSW Ministry of Health:

Work in synchronization with Public Health Organizations for policy implementation

Enable key requirements and set new standards for effective policy implementation

Clinical Excellence Commission:

For ensuring medication safety, promote such medical policies

Drug and Therapeutics Committees:

Involvement in devising, approval and monitoring implementation of policies, protocols and medical procedures

Furnish occurring errors regarding safe implementation of medical policy

Directors of Clinical Governance:

Affirm with executive members to:

Applicability of the policy on staff, parents, guardians, children and volunteers

Analyze the responsibilities of the organization's leadership

Allocate personnel, resources and tasks in order to work on the postulate stipulated by the policy

Support line managers with means to execute the said policy fully

All reports are relayed to NSW Ministry of Health directly

Guaranteeing the necessitated protocols, policies and procedures in order to facilitate application of policy (NSW, 2013).

Impact this policy will have on resources

The present health policy is simply cost-consuming for healthcare facilities, including malpractice suits, various treatments and prolonged hospital stays. Average costs for typified medical-associated ailments can range from additional lab tests costing $95 in a university hospital to intensive care priced at $2,640. The net-cost of medical-related issues at any hospital in 1994 was approximately $1.5 million (Schneider, Gift, & Lee, 1995). With implementation of this policy, these costs can be brought down significantly.