NR 584NP Week 1 Discussion_Quality and Safety - Medication Errors

Patient education is another imperative role that APNs hold. A current initiative in our hospital is ensuring that patients are educated on what medications they are being given and why; This allows patients to also play a role in questioning new medications they have never taken and ensuring open communication. There have been numerous times that patients were accidentally ordered additional doses of their home medications because the providers were not aware that the patient had taken their home medications earlier in the day. Collaborating with the patient is just as important as collaborating with the rest of the interdisciplinary team. Lastly, APNs can initiate quality improvement projects within their field. Quality improvement projects are important in promoting improved patient outcomes. Our hospital is lucky enough to provide nurses with their personal work phones which allow us to scan medications to ensure all medication rights. Previously the scan rates within the emergency department were the lowest amongst all the branches of the system but the initiative to increase our barcode medication administration (BCMA) score has placed us back up to the >95% scan rate. Medication errors are of interest in my future role as a nurse informaticist as technology has been proven to reduce the average number of medication errors. A quantitative nonexperimental comparison within the Veterans Affairs Medical Center showed a “10.8% reduction in medication error rates and 21% reduction in the average number of medications given in error per chart” after BCMA technology was initiated in the emergency department (Gauthier-Wetzel, 2022). A quality initiative held within a pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) in Saudi Arabia includes many action plans including electronic order sets and utilization of the pediatric drug library (Ghezaywi, 2024). The electronic order sets include preset standard guideline orders which would decrease the likelihood of ordering errors compared to individually ordering each order for nursing parameters such as vitals, blood sugar, and medication titration parameters. Utilization of the drug library is truly under-appreciated. Drug libraries allow nurses and patients to understand the indications for medications and common side effects to look out for. These two action plans in conjunction with a few other initiatives have contributed to the decrease in medication administration error rate by “75% during the first quarter of 2021 and reached a rate of zero medication errors/1000 patient days during the first quarter of 2022” (Ghezaywi, 2024). Technology helps prevent user errors which is important when a patient’s life is on the line. References Gauthier-Wetzel, H. E. (2022). Barcode Medication Administration Software Technology Use in the Emergency Department and Medication Error Rates. Computers, Informatics, Nursing, 40(6), 382–388. https://doi.org/10.1097/CIN.0000000000000846 Ghezaywi, Z., Alali, H., Kazzaz, Y., Ling, C. M., Esabia, J., Murabi, I., Mncube, O., Menez, A., Alsmari, A., & Antar, M. (2024). Targeting zero medication administration errors in the