Identifying Effective Strategies to Reduce Medication Errors

Introduction

Nurses are responsible for the largest percentage of medication errors. Medication errors adversely affect more than 7 million patients, cost almost $21 billion and result in excess of one million emergency room visits and 3.5 million additional visits to doctors’ offices each year (Stoppler & Marks, 2018).

Research Question

Problem: Medication errors remain the leading cause of adverse incidents for inpatients in the United States.

Intervention: Develop and disseminate an attractive and informative poster that underscores the severity of the problem and its causes, and provides nursing staff with the mnemonic five “rights” of medication administration (i.e., right patient, the right drug, the right dose, the right route and the right time). Nursing supervisors were requested to hang The posters in a prominent location at all nursing stations (see below).

Comparison: A comparison of medication error rates following the dissemination of the poster with benchmarked data.

Outcome: The outcome of this intervention is expected to have a positive effect on medication error rates.

Purpose

The purpose of this initiative was to identify effective strategies for reducing medication errors that can result in extended inpatient stays or even death.

Results

Based on the average monthly error rate using patient incident reports for the 6 months preceding the initiative, the poster contributed to a 28% reduction in the number of medication errors made in the target hospital.

Implications for Nursing

Posters are a highly cost effective strategy for reducing mediation errors. Many if not most tertiary healthcare facilities have in-house graphics departments that can support these types of initiatives.

References

Stoppler, M. C. & Marks, J. W. (2018) The most common medication errors. MedicineNet. Retrieved from https://www.medicine net.com/drugs_the_most_common_ medication_errors/views.htm.