WEEK 3 JOURNALBASED ON WEEK 1 JOURNAL AND MILESTONE 1 WITH FEEDBACK FROM PROFESSOR ( ALL ATTACHED)Requirements and GuidelinesYou will submit one journal entry to help you think through Milestone 2.Do

Assignment Criteria

Your Answers:

(NOTE: See Milestone 1 Grading Rubric for details required in each area.)

Nursing Care Issue and Desired Outcome

50 points

Nursing Care Issue: Deaths resulting from medication errors

Desired Outcome: Reduce the number of outpatient and inpatient deaths to zero in the next six months.

Details of the Issue

50 points

A medication error is a preventable event in the treatment process of a patient due to inappropriate medication which can have a potential or leads to harm in the patient’s health condition. Medication errors can occur during the prescription of dosage to a patient, the determination of which dosage regimen or medicine to use as well as the wrong administering of the medicine. The manufacturing formulation and the dispensing of the formulation also lead to medication errors.

Medication errors result in adverse drug reactions. Adverse events are the harmful and unpleasant reaction which results from the administration of a medicinal product not appropriate for the patient.

Although medication errors cause serious effects on the patient and at times death, there are very few reported cases of medication errors. Most nurses are afraid of reporting cases where wrong medication has been done to a patient due to the fear of the blame game rather than correcting the error made. Also, errors going unnoticed may affect the reported cases of the errors unless there is a serious reaction to a dosage.

Therefore nurses should be encouraged to report the cases of medication errors especially the prescription error which is common to most nurses in the field. To encourage this, they should be provided with blame free, non-punitive environment. Also, they should be keen when prescribing medicine to offer balanced prescribing to patients. Balanced prescribing involves the use of the appropriate medicine upon a patient according to the patient’s condition and within the limits that may be created by uncertainties to balance the optimum benefit of harm.

Good record keeping of patients’ records may ease retrieval which results in right medication to patients as well as an assessment of a patient health condition and the decision of the drug that should be administered.

Reason Issue Selected

50 points

I selected the issue of medication errors because there has been an increase in the reported cases of medication errors especially when there are handoffs among nurses. During the transition, nurses who take over may administer wrong drugs to a patient due to the lack of the patient’s previous information. Poor record keeping of the patient records may lead to the prescription of a wrong drug according to a patient’s health condition which may result to harm or in extreme cases death of the patient.

In the current facility, most of the reported cases of medication errors result from the nurse's handoffs. When there is the transition of the nurses, those who take over at times do not get the exact records of a patient’s dosage administration and hence ends up giving or prescribing the wrong medicine to a patient.

Another reason that led to the choice of the topic is that most new nurses in the profession have a fear of reporting the cases of errors made due to the fear of criticism or in some cases they are not able to detect errors. Therefore there is a need to encourage nurses to speak up, as well as getting keen with the prescription of drugs by keeping close track of patient’s health record.