Nurses' Responsibility in the Prevention of medications errors - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages... The nurse administrators can reduce the nurses’ workloads in order to help reduce the errors. Another remedial procedure is to requiring all nurses to implement error reduction procedures. Reduction of nurse burnouts reduced medical errors. Nurses must responsively prevent or lessen of medication errors to permissible levels. Evidently, the findings indicate healthcare professionals, especially nurses, should responsively prevent or reduce medication errors to allowable occurrences. Keywords: medication errors, remedial action, burnout Nursing Professional’s Responsibility to End/lessen Medications Errors Introduction Healthcare entails the nurses’ role in the patient’s recuperation. The research delves on the types of medication errors. The research delves on medication error reduction strategies. Medical errors may cause the patients’ death. Medical errors can be reduced. Healthcare professionals, especially nurses, and other healthcare facility workers are responsible for the prevention of medication errors. The nurses are required to exert all efforts to eliminate medication errors. Most of the medication errors occur during certain situations. One of the situations is during the nurse duty shifts. One medication error occurs when the prior shift nurse forgets to give the medication to the patient. The next duty nurse erroneously does not scrutinize whether the prior duty nurse gave the patient the required medication. The error can be prevented by requiring all the next duty nurses to compulsorily scrutinize the prior nurses’ chart notations (Kalra, 2011). Further, Dorit Pud and Anat Zahavy reiterated “one of the best strategies to reduce medication errors is to scrutinize possible loopholes in the entire healthcare process and not focus on individual isolated medication error cases” (Dorit & Anat, 2010, p. 794). The loopholes include unintentional recording of medication intakes. Forgetting to record the patient’s actual medicine intakes may persuade the next nurse to erroneously give the same medicine to the patient. The overdose may cause severe health effects on the patient. Further, M. Wernli and D. Schwappach insist that “patients can play an important part in reducing medication errors by persuading the patients to immediately report any perceived errors to concerned medical professionals for immediate remedy” (Wernli & Schawppach, 2010, p. 285). Another possible medication error may occur during patient transfers. The patient is originally staying at hospital’s left wing. The patient is transferred to right wing in order to lessen the time needed for the resident medical doctor to move from doctor’s office to the patient’s ward bed. When the patient is transferred to the right hospital wing, another nurse committed medication error when she made a new chart. The error can be avoided by requiring all nurses to exert more time and effort to ensure that the patient’s chart is religiously replicated to eliminate the medication errors (Kalra, 2011). Nurses must implement medical intervention requirements to eliminate medication errors (Zerwekh & Claborn, 2010). When the nurse discovers an error in the drug order, the nurse should immediately question whether the drug order is correctness. When the nurse gathers enough evidences to prove there was a medication error, the nurse must immediately report the medication er ...Download file to see next pagesRead More