The Importance Of Right-Time Administrations

Introduction In this paper, a meaningful clinical event, regarding delayed medications, is examined. The paper explores the importance of right-time administration and causative factors and preventative measures of wrong-time errors. As a final point, I describe how I would handle the scenario differently after learning strategies to reduce late medication administrations, thus reducing patient harm.
Look Back/Elaborate During week five, I was assigned to two patients (A and B), one of whom is a shared client (patient B) between a colleague and I. Strategically, my colleague and I planned out the first half of the shift, such that we would perform vital signs and head-to-toe assessments first, administer medications in accordance with the
Distractions or interruptions include noises, conversation, and phone calls, whereas workload includes multiple patients and patients who require more assistance (Brady, Malone, & Fleming, 2009; Pape, 2013). Pharmacy and drug unavailability issues are suggested to result from ineffective collaboration between the members of the healthcare team (Chua et al., 2010; Taufiq, 2015). Specifically, one of the studies discusses the causes of medication errors pertaining to nursing students. The paper proposes that nursing students have multiple patients, insufficient knowledge regarding medication as well as patient status, poor collaboration skills, difficulties concentrating, and inexperience (Valdez, de Guzman, & Escolar-Chua, 2013). Lack of experience may result from inadequate exposure to certain clinical situations, which poses more challenge for students when handling the increasing workload, all of which may contribute to mental lapses (Valdez et al., 2013). Furthermore, other contributing factors are limited critical thinking and prioritizing skills (Brady et al.,
medications and check their availability. By doing so, I would be aware that patient B has critical drugs to receive, whereas patient A does not. Thus, I would know to administer patient B’s medications first. By checking drug availability prior to administration, I would know that patient B is missing a medication and immediately inform the nurse about this. The order would then be placed and the drug would arrive on the unit on time or within the 30 minute margin. Also, knowing that patient B has crucial medications, I would have handled the leakage incident differently. For instance, I would inform my nurse that I can just clean the affected body part and place a blue pad on the soiled linens for now, and return later to provide proper hygiene care and bed making after delivering both of my patients’ medications. Furthermore, when I was interrupted by the nurse, I would kindly say, “if you don’t mind, I will just prepare and give the medications and then we can talk afterwards. Please and thank you.” Generally, if I handle the situation this way, I would have delivered patient B’s medications at the specified time and patient A’s medications within the allowed time-margin, which would avoid medication errors.
Conclusion
Right-time administrations is important to promote patients’ health and safety, as it maintains therapeutic blood levels (Potter & Perry, 2014). The cause of