Identifying Opportunities to Reduce Medication Errors in Tertiary Healthcare Settings

Addressing Complex Issues in Healthcare Settings

Addressing Complex Issues in Healthcare

At present, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration receives more than 400,000 reports concerning drug-related medication errors in the United States each year (Medication error statistics, 2022). Many of these medication errors result in serious patient harm, including death (Jin et al., 2022). Although the causes of medication errors vary, miscommunications among nursing staff represent one of the major sources today and many of these preventable errors will continue to occur unless and until nurses and other healthcare practitioners follow hospital protocols when administering medications.

Healthcare Professionals Needed to Make a Positive Change

An interdisciplinary team comprised of a doctor of nursing practice (DNP) representative from nursing services as well as representatives from pharmacy and information resource management (IRM) to identify the specific causes and sources of medication errors, including responsible individual, shift, and ward and track them over time to identify opportunities to reduce error rates. In addition, the nursing leader should facilitate collaboration between team members to ensure that medication incident reports from all services are submitted in a timely and transparent fashion, the pharmacy leader should provide examples of similar-sounding medication names and the issues involved in ensuring timely prescription refills, and the IRM representative should provide the trending support that is needed for the trending the medication error data.

Possible Difference in Point-of-Views/Concerns

Pharmacy and IRM representative views will invariably focus on the nurses who are on the front line of patient care, but it is essential for the team to determine the source of all medication errors. Facilitating this type of collaboration between interdisciplinary healthcare team members is a DNP essential (The Essentials of Doctoral Education for Advanced Nursing Practice, 2006). Likewise, assembling a multidisciplinary team to address problems such as medication errors is a DNP role specific competency.

Improving Synergy and Collaborative Approach

The multidisciplinary team described above will bring significant expertise to bear on the medication error problem but there will inevitably be different perspectives involved concerning how best to proceed. The DNP nursing leader is in a good position to use a transformational leadership style to coordinate the contributions of each team member by keeping the focus on improving patient care by reducing preventable medication errors (Lopez et al., 2022).

Adopting a Patient-Centered and Relationship-Based Approach

Multidisciplinary teams have successfully addressed medication errors by implementing policies to create a patient-centered and relationship-based approach which includes a nonpunitive-incident reporting environment, developing an education and communication strategy that promotes safe medication practices and forging a collaborative medication administration policy (Sim & Joyner, 2012). In addition, a patient-centered and relationship-based approach to addressing medication errors should also include a number of quick fixes that generate momentum and provide some immediate successes” (Sim & Joyner. 2012, p. 403).

In Summary

The sources of medication errors are multiple, but the vast majority of them are caused by human mistakes, most commonly by nursing staff but by other healthcare practitioners as well. By making the reduction of medication errors a priority and assembling a multidisciplinary team to identify appropriate strategies for this purpose, DNPs can make a substantive difference in the quality of care that is provided patients.