The Importance Of Medication Errors

In this paper, I am going to be comparing two different articles about medication errors by nurses. Medication errors happen way too often and I hope that by writing this paper, I can help reduce my chance or someone else’s chance of making a medication error. The first medication error article that I read was about a male patient in Florida. The patient was complaining of an upset stomach so the physician prescribed an antacid. Instead of giving the patient an antacid, that nurse gave the patient pancuronium, which is a muscle relaxant and paralytic. The patient went into cardiac arrest and died a month later. The reason this medication error happened was because the nurse just looked at the packaging and thought that it looked like an antacid. The nurse never even read the name on the medication, never scanned the medication, and never checked the patient’s ID band to the medication. If the nurse would have done just one of those, then that error would have never happened. It is not right to automatically assume that a medication is the right medication just by looking at the packaging. In nursing school, we are taught to check the medication at least three times in order to prevent medication errors. I do not believe the nurse that gave
He went to the hospital because he thought he had a bad case of the flu, but he ended up having diverticulitis. The physician prescribed 1mg of dilaudid every four hours, but he was given 4mg on more than one occasion. Too much dilaudid caused the patient to become unresponsive and they rushed him to ICU. He later died from an overdose of dilaudid. I believe that the main cause of this error was that whoever administered this medication was just not paying enough attention. This error could have been prevented by simply paying more attention and reading the order better. Information was not given on if the nurse reported it