Medical Error Reduction Strategies
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Home Food Drugs Medical Devices Radiation-Emitting Products Vaccines, Blood & Biologics Animal & Veterinary Cosmetics Tobacco Products Drugs Home Drugs Resources how to prevent medication errors in nursing for You Information for Consumers (Drugs) Strategies to Reduce Medication Errors: Working ways to prevent medication errors to Improve Medication Safety Share Tweet Linkedin Pin it More sharing options Linkedin Pin it Email Print When Jacquelyn
Medication Errors Statistics 2015
Ley shattered her elbow on the soccer field, her parents set out to find her the best care in Minneapolis. "We drove past five other hospitals to get to the one
Most Common Medication Errors By Nurses
we wanted," says Carol Ley, M.D., an occupational health physician. Her husband, an orthopedic surgeon, made sure Jacquelyn got the right surgeon. After a successful three-hour surgery to repair the broken bones, Jacquelyn, who was 9 at the time, received the pain medicine morphine through a pump and was hooked up to a heart monitor, breathing monitor, and blood oxygen monitor. Her recovery how to prevent medication errors in hospitals was going so well that doctors decided to turn off the morphine pump and to forgo regular checks of her vital signs.Carol Ley slept in her daughter's hospital room that night. When she woke up in the middle of the night and checked on her, Jacquelyn was barely breathing. "I called her name, but she wouldn't respond," she says. "I shook her and called for help." The morphine pump hadn't been shut down, but had accidentally been turned up high. The narcotic flooded Jacquelyn's body. She survived the overdose, but it was a close call. "If three more hours had gone by, I don't think Jacquelyn would have survived," Ley says. "Fortunately, I woke up."Ley was pleased with the way the hospital handled the error. "They came right out and said the morphine pump was incorrectly programmed, they told me the steps they were going to take to make sure Jacquelyn was OK, and they also told me what they were going to do to make sure this kind of mistake won't happen again. And that's very important to me." The hospital began using pumps that are
Let’s resolve to do better, highlighted the fact that, despite error-prevention efforts, look-alike drug names, sound-alike drug names, and look-alike packaging continue to be a common source of medication errors. Selecting the
Medication Error Prevention For Healthcare Providers
best error-prevention strategies is not an easy task. Even when system-based causes such medication error statistics 2014 as look- and sound-alike issues have been identified, it may be unclear which error-prevention strategies will be most effective. Listed medication error prevention strategies below and in Table 1 are examples of error-prevention strategies in order of effectiveness for creating lasting system changes for safe medication use. Those listed first are more powerful because they focus on http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/ResourcesForYou/Consumers/ucm143553.htm changes to the system in which individuals operate. As the list descends, strategies that target system changes, but rely in some part on human vigilance and memory are presented. Strategies toward the end are familiar and often easy to implement, but rely entirely on human vigilance. Fail-safes and constraints are among the most powerful and effective error-prevention strategies. They involve true system changes in the design of https://www.ismp.org/newsletters/ambulatory/archives/200602_4.asp products or how individuals interact within the system. Examples outside of healthcare would include the inability to start a car while the gearshift is in reverse or using fingerprint verification to enter a building or computer system. At a community pharmacy where the pharmacy computer system is integrated with the cash register, a fail-safe would prevent the clerk from “ringing up” the prescription unless final verification by a pharmacist was noted in the system. Forcing functions are procedures that create a “hard stop” during a process to help ensure that important information is provided before proceeding; often referred to as a “lock and key” design. For example, an electronic prescribing system in a physician’s office that requires the indication to be entered for each medication before it is processed and sent to the pharmacy; a pharmacy computer system that prevents overriding selected high-alert messages without a notation (e.g., entry of the patientspecific indication for selected error-prone medications); or a bar-code scanning system that does not allow final verification of a product without a positive match between the selected product and the profiled medication. Automation and computerization of medication-use processes and tasks can lessen human fallibility by limiting reli
Treatments & Outcomes Telehealth Hospital Management Healthcare IT Finance Electronic Health Records | EHR Regulatory Quality & Safety Home : Healthcare Treatments & OutcomesHealthcare Treatments & Outcomes5 strategies for hospitals to http://www.healthcarebusinesstech.com/medical-error-prevent/ prevent medical errors by Jess White May 19, 2016 Comments (0) Medical errors in hospitals have become all too common nowadays. And although it can be tough to prevent them, it’s possible in many cases, especially if hospitals are willing to take various approaches to solving the problem. Recent research indicates that medical errors may be the third leading cause of death medication error in the country. Progress has been made over the years – but it’s not enough. Ideas for prevention Attorney James Lieber, author of Killer Care: How Medical Error Became America's Third Largest Cause of Death, And What Can Be Done About It, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal outlining some of the efforts hospitals have made in the past to to prevent medication prevent medical errors, including the use of standard protocols to reduce ventilator and central line infections. In his article, Lieber outlines five additional strategies hospitals and physicians could adopt to make a big difference for reducing medical errors: Adopt a structure for handoff conversations. One of the biggest contributors to serious medical errors is miscommunication among staff during shift changes. According to the Joint Commission, it causes the majority of serious injuries and deaths from medical errors. Using checklists and other tools to make sure nothing’s missed during handoff conversations is crucial to preventing mistakes. Get pharmacists more directly involved in patient treatment. It’s common for doctors and nurses to make the rounds with patients together. Lieber proposes adding pharmacists into the mix. That way, doctors can get direct information about how different drugs may adversely affect patients’ conditions – and which ones they should prescribe instead. Pharmacists may also be able to more easily catch mistakes involving medication, such as ordering the wrong dosage or drug for a patient. Work to reduce infections. Hospital-acquired infections are some of the most dangerous complications patients experie