Adequate Nurse Staffing Case Study

Introduction
Improving the quality of care and patient safety is the top priority of every hospital.
Strategies and interventions are implemented often to improve quality and safety in the hospital settings. One approach is clinical risk management, it evaluates system failures and identifies what places patients at risk of harm and takes action to prevent or control such. Evaluating the processes in place allow for improvement continuance. Unfortunately, healthcare facilities still struggle to prevent errors. Clinical risk associated with adverse events include, falls, surgical events, medication errors, near misses, and diagnostic errors. Many of this events can be attributed to system failures. One particular issue and is often ignored is nursing staffing.
Adequate nurse
Four different hospitals will be chosen for the study, and will only include medical surgical units. Also a retrospective study of payroll records for the past three years will also be evaluated. This will allow for gathering of information in regards to number of nurses working on a particular shift and correlated with those days where medication mistakes were found.
EFFECTS OF NURSING STAFFING AND MEDICATION ERRORS 6
Population and Sampling Plan
Four different hospitals will be chosen for the study, out of these hospitals only the medical surgical units will be accounted for. Medication errors committed only by nurses will be evaluated. Risk management departments and hospitals must agree to participate and allow for the revision of records containing this information. Records on medication errors cannot be older than three years. Staffing will be evaluated during the day’s errors were committed by using payroll records.
Data collection and Procedure Plan
Using a retrospective approach medication error records would be reviewed, the