Preventing Medical Errors - Paper Example

Medical Errors are preventable events that can cause inappropriate medicine use, harm the patient, taint the image of the healthcare organization and increases the economic burden of illness due to an increased hospital stay and increased the cost of prescription drugs. Below is the plan that would be implemented by the hospitals nurse head, Head of the nursing staff, the charge nurse and the nurse manager.

Evidence-Based Practices

Step 1: Medical Error Detection

The first step in preventing Medical Errors is to improve error detection. The hospitals can implement the following methods to detect Medical Errors. For example, the can invest in computerized monitoring, the claims data, or by using direct observation followed by incident reporting and understating the pattern of Medical error befog proposing a solution. This way, his management would be able to allocate more resources to be used in combating Medical Errors. Once the administration has documented the toyed of risk they face, they rescued to the special nurses the right strategies to follow.

Step2: Follow documented procedures

The most effective intervention for Medical Errors is the use of evidence-based practices. For example, according to Spath, (2013), the most efficient way to prevent Medical Errors is to use documented interventions with evidence. For example, Medical Errors can be avoided through nurse educations. Nurse education helps in managing medicine, effective patient follow-up, right prescription, double checking and triple checking prescriptions. Nurses should be taught about the importance of following the medicine administration records

Step2; Drafting Medical reconciliation steps

The head nurse should draft the Medical reconciliation procedures. Medical Errors can be prevented by following the proper medicine reconciliation procedures. The hospitals should have in place policies or mechanisms for medicine reconciliation whenever a patient is transferred between healthcare settings of facilities (Yoder-Wise, 2015). Each medicine should be reviewed and verified to ensure that the medicine is prescribed to the right patient, the correct medicine is prescribed, and the proper dosage is indicated as well as the correct route and time (Makary, & Daniel, 2016; Wright, & Khatri, 2015).

Step3: Implement mandatory Nurses education and orientation policy

The nurses education is central to mitigating medical error risks. Medicine administration training and refresher course should be made compulsory for all the hospital workers. As part of the orientation, the nurses should be taught about the dangers or improper prescription, poor medicine administration (Perla, Provost, & Murray, 2011).

References

Spath, P. (2013). Introduction to healthcare quality management (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: Health Administration Press.

Yoder-Wise, P. (2015). Leading and managing in nursing (6th ed.). St. Louis, MO: Mosby.

Makary, M., & Daniel, M. (2016). Medical error-the third leading cause of death in the US. BMJ: British Medical Journal (Online), 353.

Wright, W., & Khatri, N. (2015). Bullying among nursing staff: Relationship with psychological/behavioral responses of nurses and medical errors. Health care management review, 40(2), 139-147.Perla, R. J., Provost, L. P., & Murray, S. K. (2011). The run chart: a simple analytical tool for learning from variation in healthcare processes. BMJ Quality & Safety, 20(1), 46-51. doi:10.1136/bmjqs.2009.037895