Medication administration errors in pediatric healthcare settings

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).

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.

Impact of not following ethical standards

The nursing professionals can be trained for adhering to hospital policy in conjunction with medical administration in order to bring them to speed with current trends or else they should be reported to Board of Nursing for disciplinary action. The patient is fully eligible to sue the nurse for malpractice or failing to comply with nursing standards set by hospital (Buppert, 2011).

Responsibility of professional licensing boards as it applies to patient safety

Major professional health bodies such as American Nurses Association (ANA), International Council of Nurses (ICN), Institute for Safe Medical Practices (ISMP),National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) are taking action in regards to guaranteeing optimum health and safety for patients, devising and strategizing relevant safety and medical policies, nurse code, ethic code as well as workplace union policies. These bodies will be involved in evaluating, reporting and measuring healthcare results after thorough examination (Ballard, 2003).