Thesis Example: Evidenced-Based Solution to Wrong Drug Prescription

Cases of medical error like wrong drug prescription have had significant impacts on the lives of the patients to their family and the entire health sectors. Despite a decrease in the case of incorrect drug prescription, there are still few cases due to improving technologies; there are few cases where patients get diagnosed with wrong drugs due to the failure of caregivers being keen during the treatment period. As a result of wrong drug prescription, some patients have suffered severe health consequences for the rest of their lives (Martin et al., 2017). Some family of the affected has spent a lot of resources in treating their people who are the victims of the wrong drug prescription causing them the whole saving. In many cases, families have been left destitute as a result of spending too much on the treatment of their families and relatives who are the victims of the wrong drug diagnosis. Additionally, cases of death as a result of drug diagnosis have caused a lot of pain to many families. Therefore, there is a need to solve these problems of drug prescription one and for all.

Evidence-based Solution to Wrong Drug Prescription

According to the recent research by the Health People 2020, the primary cause of wrong drug prescription is as a result of packaging. The packaging of the drug in a similar container as led to the health worker giving the patient wrong drugs to the patients (Bicket et al., 2017). Therefore, ensuring that containers that are used in packaging of drugs have different colors is the best solution the problems of wrong drug diagnosis. Secondly, some drugs are similar or almost similar in name. Therefore, this has led to wrong drug diagnosis since the caregiving frequently gets confused thereby prescribing the wrong medication to the patients. Thus, the best solution to this problem is that the health sector should ensure that drugs are named differently during manufacturing period. Moreover, there some drugs that are not prescribed during manufacturing. In many cases, such drugs have wrongly used to diagnosis penitent thereby causing a lot of suffering. Therefore, actors in the health sectors should ensure that drugs are appropriately prescribed to health worker know the amount that they should use when treating the patient.

Nursing Intervention

Nursing intervention plays a crucial role in ensuring that there is a reduction of wrong drug prescription in various hospitals including St Joseph Hospital in Burbank. The following are some of the nursing intervention that has been put into practice recently health workers;

Nursing education- is a protective measure against medical errors. When nurses are well educated on how to handling follow the treatment procedure, then cases of wrong drug prescription can reduce. Education also help the health workers to calculate the correct dose to give to the patient

Interdisciplinary collaboration- when health worker ensures that there is an efficient working relationship between them and the drug manufacturers, wrong drug prescription due to medication name and prescription can be handled since they can get the right information from the manufacturers (Lapane et al., 2011).

Nursing unity- unity among nurses ensure that there is mandatory double checking of drugs between two or more nurses before it is administered to the patients

Outcome of Nursing Intervention

The combined efforts of nurses have resulted in the reduction of wrong drug prescription by a more significant margin. Therefore, this has helped in gaining the trust of the patient who may have been the victim of wrong drug prescription earlier. Additionally, nursing intervention as also resulted in efficiently naming, labelling and coloring of the containers used in packing of the drugs. Thus, this has resulted in the reduction of the wrong drug prescription (Creswell, 2012). Additionally, nursing practices like rotational shifts have been increased so that nurses can have an extended resting period which helps in breaking the monotony hence improving service delivery. Moreover, due to the nursing intervention, different health care agencies have ensured that they have well-trained nurses, physicians and pharmacist to ensure efficient delivery of health services.

References

Bicket, M. C., Kattail, D., Yaster, M., Wu, C. L., & Pronovost, P. (2017). An analysis of errors, discrepancies, and variation in opioid prescriptions for adult outpatients at a teaching hospital. Journal of opioid management, 13(1), 51.

Creswell, John W. (2012). Educational research: Planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc

Lapane, K. L., Hughes, C. M., Daiello, L. A., Cameron, K. A., & Feinberg, J. (2011). Effect of a pharmacistled multicomponent intervention focusing on the medication monitoring phase to prevent potential adverse drug events in nursing homes. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 59(7), 1238-1245.

Martin, L. D., Grigg, E. B., Verma, S., Latham, G. J., Rampersad, S. E., & Martin, L. D. (2017). Outcomes of a Failure Mode and Effects Analysis for medication errors in pediatric anaesthesia. Pediatric Anesthesia, 27(6), 571-580.