Medication Administration Safety

Excerpt

There is a large and growing body of research addressing medication safety in health care. This literature covers the extent of the problem of medication errors and adverse drug events, the phases of the medication-use process vulnerable to error, and the threats all of this poses for patients. As this body of literature is evaluated, the fact that there are crucial areas about which we know little becomes apparent. Nurses are most involved at the medication administration phase, although they provide a vital function in detecting and preventing errors that occurred in the prescribing, transcribing, and dispensing stages. Administration errors comprise a significant proportion of all errors and yet, beyond that fact, there isn’t much known about the causes or about the effectiveness of proposed solutions. Research addressing the complex process of medication use in hospitals is badly needed and requires a new approach to produce valid knowledge from studies done in the field with few controls of confounding factors.