Causes Of Medication Errors

Critical appraisal guidelines: Quantitative study Medication errors has always been a major problem in healthcare. Drugs errors continue to claim many innocent lives. The purpose of the research was to identified the causes of medication errors during cardiopulmonary arrest. According by the article by Flannery & Parli (2016), medication errors in the intensive care unit (ICU) range from 8.1 to 2344 per 1000 patient-days. Unfortunately, drug errors that occurred during Cardiac resuscitation are less identified and reported. The main reason for that is because the patients involved are in their most vulnerable state. In this emergent situation, medication errors are more likely to have a detrimental outcome. It is very likely for drug errors
Some of the participants involved were physicians, nurses, respiratory therapist and other members of a rapid response team. Some of the benefits identify by the authors were the presence of many team members in one room while the study was in progress. The team members were directly observed by a pharmacist during the code for drug errors. The physician would give orders and the nurse would draw the medication and have it ready to be administered. The pharmacist would then verify the actual medication drawn compere to the verbal order. Furthermore, the pharmacist would only intervene with possible errors. Some the risk factors are the people directly involve reported feeling overwhelmed. The participants were working under a lot pressure. Just by knowing someone was there just to look for errors elevated their level of anxiety and stress. Another risk factor that was not mention was team members may feel directly targeted because their errors where documented in front of many other members. They may feel incompetent and embarrassed. The study did not specifically mention informed consent. However, the individual who participated were aware of the study. Patients information were not disclosed. The authors did not mention whether or not approval was obtained from the agency review board. However, the study was conducted primarily in the emergency department and the intensive care unit which is where most of the code
Medication errors during cardiopulmonary resuscitation and surrounding events, are not well characterized but may be more frequent than previously thought. There are plenty of rooms for errors during a code as everyone is acting really fast and can easily missed a step. One of the best way to prevent these code related errors, is to reduce the number and frequency of codes by alerting the rapid response team of any change in