In seeking to administer drugs, nurses ought to be guided by the five medical administration rights. These are patient, time, dose, drug, and route (You, Choe, Park, Kim, and Son, 2015). One issue that I consider to be of great concern in my practice is medicating patients late leading to noncompliance. This happens to be one of the more significant errors in the administration of medications in a healthcare setting, with the other errors being wrong dose and wrong medication. When nurses fail to administer drugs to patients as prescribed – in the right dosage and at the right time - such an action gets in the way of the full realization of drug benefits. According to Stokowski (2012), the rule of the thumb when it comes to the administration of medications has been within half-an-hour before or after the time scheduled for administration.In seeking to locate evidence-based practices that address the concern highlighted herein, this text took into consideration reliable and credible research sources. The credibility of the said sources was assessed on the basis of the qualifications and credentials of the authors, comprehensiveness of the information presented, and the accuracy of presented data. Well-researched and presented texts citing verifiable sources were taken into...
For instance, Berdot at al. (as cited in Stokowski 2012) “found an overall medication error rate of 27.6%, but only 7.5% when wrong-time errors were excluded.” Also, in their observation of more than 30 healthcare installations, Barker et al. (as cited in Stokowski 2012) found that 19% of the total number of medication doses administered involved a minimum of 1 error – with approximately half of these falling under wrong-time errors. Medication errors could be triggered by a wide range of factors.
Studies conducted in the past have clearly indicated that such factors as disruptions and interruptions, general work environment, and failure to maintain ward stock ware are to blame for wrong-time errors (Keers, Williams, Cooke, and Ashcroft, 2013). In that regard, therefore, healthcare organizations ought to take into consideration these factors in an attempt to take corrective and remedial measures meant to minimize instances of patients being offered medications in a format that is not timely, thereby leading to noncompliance. In a study titled Perceptions Regarding Medication Administration Errors Among…
