DNP Project Medication Safety Education to Reduce Medication Errors

DNP PROJECT

Final Project Plan

The proposed project seeks to address the high incidence of medication errors at the clinical site by implementing a mandatory medication safety education for clinical staff. The incidence of medication errors at the facility has risen significantly over the past year, resulting in preventable injury, death, and reputational issues. This text presents the final translation action plan to start off the implementation phase. It outlines the finalized project management tool, project scope and objectives, barriers to implementation, strategies for overcoming barriers, and the legal/ethical implications to implementation.

Project Scope and Objectives

The education program will take place within the clinical site, and will involve all nurses, physicians, and pharmacists. It will involve weekly training sessions covering five main thematic areas: the eight rights of medication administration, error management strategies, medication sensitivity, dose calculations, and international patient safety guidelines (Abukhader & Abukhader, 2020). The project’s objective is to reduce the incidence of medication errors at the facility by 50 percent. The project team predicts that consequently, this will increase the patient satisfaction index by 30 percent.

Project Management Tool

The project team settled on the Gantt chart as the appropriate project management tool. The Gantt chart gives a clear presentation of project tasks and when they are scheduled to be completed. It offers, at-a-glance, guidance on project progress, thus allowing participants to plan their schedules (Milosevic, 2003). The project team felt that since the project involves all clinical staff in the facility, it may be beneficial to have a project management tool that is easy to interpret so that all participants understand the progress made in accomplishing set tasks and what may still be pending.

Possible Barriers to Implementation

One of the primary barriers to implementation would be resistance to change from participants. Tappen et al. (2017) posit that participants may be resistant for various reasons, including lack of confidence in the proposed change and concerns about liability. Participants in this project may resist change because it requires them to report medication errors, which raises liability concerns. Resistance would make stakeholders less willing to take part in the change and some may even attempt to sabotage it to ensure that it does not succeed.

The second possible barrier is scarcity of resources (Dang et al., 2021). Due to resource limitations, the education program may not cover all important themes in the area of medication safety. Further, scarce resources limit the program to in-class sessions and make other effective learning options such as benchmarking trips to other successful facilities impossible. At the same time, due to resource limitations, the project implementers may not provide all the equipment such as gadgets for online lessons. Participants will be forced to make arrangements for their own gadgets, which may limit participation rates for disadvantaged employees.

Another possible barrier is competing demands between the project and other change initiatives taking place at the clinical site at the same time (Dang et al., 2021). Competing demands may deviate the attention of staff and management, making it difficult to complete the project on time.

Finally, the project team foresees that technical problems may also arise during implementation. Some participants may be unable to manoeuvre the system, to log in to the online trainings, download learning material, engage in group activities, or complete assessments that will be administered online. Such technical problems could cause delays during training sessions and reduce effectiveness when some of the participants fail to take part in all the activities.

Strategies for Addressing the Identified Barriers

The project team outlined several strategies to address these barriers. To minimize technical challenges, the project team will offer training to all staff before the project begins to ensure that they are conversant with the platform selected for delivery of online lessons (Tappen et al., 2017). Further, the project team will develop tutorial videos showing how to access the platform, download material, and complete assessments on the platform, which will be shared with participants as reference material in case they encounter problems in using the system. The champions will monitor the progress of their unit members closely and request or offer retraining sessions at intervals to help address technical barriers (Tappen et al., 2017).

To minimize resistance, the project will use change champions selected by the clinical staff to drive the change (Sipes, 2020). The staff are less likely to show resistance if one of their own is leading the change because then, they feel like part of the change rather than passive participants. The champions will appoint their co-champions, and will support the staff by changing their mindset, ensuring they follow processes, assisting with training and retraining, and consistently monitoring progress through one-on-one sessions to address any challenges that could come up (Tappen et al., 2017). The team will also minimize resistance by communicating positive results to participants when they occur as a way of motivating them to persist in implementing the project (Sipes, 2020).

Finally, to minimize the risk posed by competing demands, the project team will obtain leadership support by obtaining the approval of the hospital CEO and board of directors to carry out the project (Tappen et al., 2017). Leadership support will ensure that the champions can free up time to drive the change in their unit, that staff can freely take part in training sessions, and that the organization generally supports the change effort (Tappen et al., 2017). As part of leadership support, the project team will request the hospital leadership to allow the staff to use equipment such as computers and other hospital resources for the training if need be.

Legal and Ethical Implications to Implementation

Privacy is one of the fundamental ethical concerns in implementing the project. As part of project evaluation, the project team will review sampled patient records to determine the incidence of medication errors. The team has to ensure that patient’s privacy is protected throughout the project period. As part of ensuring that confidentiality/privacy requirements are followed, the project team will subject all the proposed evaluation procedures to an external quality assurance or audit before the same can be adopted (World Health Organization, 2013). This will ensure that all adopted procedures meet the requisite ethical standards (WHO, 2013).