Medication Errors Due to Insufficient Staff

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Table of Contents

Abstract
Introduction
Background
Assessment
Proposal Statement and Solution
Implementation Plan
Conclusion
References

Abstract

The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey results show that patient medication and record-keeping education remain a healthcare problem. Insufficient staff in these facilities have attributed these medical errors to prescriptions. The HCAPH assessment outcomes are special regards training on drug prescription and side effects and inconsistency to meet national benchmarks. Health facilities fall short of the general customs in enlightening patients about medication prescription error and the ways forward in case it happens. It is, therefore, dangerous that training is supporting evidence-based approaches in treatment exercise assessment and utilization in hospitals. Quality of Safety Education for Nurses’ competency includes patient safety and increased patient satisfaction for health outcomes.

This research addresses the matter of ineffective diagnosis communication in the nursing divisions that result in treatment errors. This has led to extra concerns while suggesting a prescription-training package to encourage patient wellbeing and high superiority attention in the medical-surgical division.

Introduction

Medication error due to insufficient staffing, particularly drug education and record-keeping, is becoming increasingly crucial in the healthcare profession. Inadequate staffing within nursing leads to errors in the treatment of patients. Insufficient enrolment levels, amount of work, and working in a rush may escalation the risk for errors and other types of error, as well as more patient detriment (Mohamed et al., 2021).

Fewer staffs in the hospitals, therefore, encounter many duties in a restricted working station. This then makes them underutilize the available resources in the hospitals. Underutilization of these resources will result in improper handling of patients and machines for patients’ treatments leading to inappropriate treatment—some cases of overlapping procedure time that require the processing of the test results. Therefore, the errors in medication and insufficiency of the available staff as a problem need to be addressed urgently. The available nurses adapt to the safety guidelines and ensure no more errors to regain the trust.

Additionally, available staff do not adhere to schedules and may even double book patients for treatment. All these lead to errors in the treatment of the patients and are likely to harm patients. Therefore, the management of the hospitals should consider adding several staff. Health workers also must be aware of the QSEN capabilities, which outline the understanding, expertise, and assertiveness to ensure safety in medication. Patient safety is one of the QSEN project’s competencies in ensuring the quality provision of medication services to patients (Plácido et al., 2018). Nurses must learn best practices to offer harmless patient attention, which consists of understanding the most effective training of patients around their medicines. However, less in number, health workers must plan, implement, and assess quality for the perfection of the assignments.

Background

Medication communication is still lacking for most healthcare workers in the healthcare industry, resulting in medication errors. Patients being cleared from the health facility understand the shortage of their given medicines, such as the role, extent of period medicines must be taken, and adverse effects. The HCAHPS survey is a valid tool for assessing patient satisfaction with one of the survey’s categories (Waszak et al., 2018). The HCAHPS survey allows hospitals to enhance patient safety and happiness by applying evidence-based practices, such as medication communication. As nurses progress, compensations for patient attention are presently associated with the value of attention a patient is given. With repayment incentives, refining patient wellbeing and superiority of awareness is essential in considering that medical errors are minimized.

Patients prefer nurse-to-nurse contact over physician-to-patient communication when it comes to medication. As a result of this discovery, the nurse-to-nurse connection concerning drug education is critical. Nurses may overlook the numerous possibilities of engaging their patients in learning about their prescription drugs because they have so many responsibilities throughout their shift, thus avoiding errors (Shindul-Rothschild et al., 2017). Nurses can use this time during medication administration, which occurs three times a day, to permit patients to contribute to their medical management. This period helps educate patients about their medications and lets them ask for inquiries about them. Education is a form of countering the medication errors they experience at work due to insufficient staff.

Assessment of patients’ knowledge and comprehension for effective communication in educating them should be done together with verbal and written education. Since the training mode is evidence-based, nurses can evaluate patients’ understanding of all the techniques used in educating them. It will also reduce the risks of wrong dosage and readmission of patients due to medication error. Therefore, the patients can use these techniques in learning about the new prescription, leading to patients’ safety and better outcome in their diagnosis. Since the nurses are also few, they can comfortably be sure that they deliver the correct medication to individual patients. Schedules can also be kept effectively and efficiently, for they are managed by patients themselves with supervision from nurses.

Patients’ safety may be jeopardized if they are not adequately educated about their medications. Medication adherence can also be affected by a lack of medication communication between nurses and patients. Medication non-adherence is a patient safety concern since it can develop new health problems or worsen existing ones. In addition, insufficient medication education might lead to higher readmission rates. Patients readmitted to hospitals are more likely to develop problems and contract hospital-acquired illnesses (Kouta et al., 2021). Readmissions are costly, costing at least $14 billion per year, meaning more expenditure to the government.

Patient satisfaction is lower when they do not know enough about their medicine and the side effects of the drugs they are administered to. With the worries, the author looked into the issue of drug education and the best practices for a solution.

Assessment

For the medical-surgical level with 25 single beds, the nurse’s units comprehend general inhabitants of 15 and age. Nevertheless, most of the patient inhabitants are 67 and of age who are prone to medication error. Nurses are responsible for five to six patients at any given moment. Since the division has a high incomings proportion thus training must begin as soon as possible. However, due to the numerous responsibilities that nurses are expected to complete, medication education is sometimes insufficient. According to the HCAHPS study, the author’s unit falls short of the national standard for medication communication(Rishoej et al., 2017). Patients, in particular, are unaware of their medication’s adverse effects, with only 30% indicating that personnel mentioned side effects.

Time constraints are a significant cause of medication errors due to the lack of readily available written materials. The healthcare workers in the hospital are also few this unavailable to educate patients on drugs prescription. On the author’s unit, time is a significant obstacle, significantly as patients’ stays are being cut short. Nurses also need to reimburse and require time and keenness to avoid errors, but the increasing population makes it hard to deliver quality. The author’s unit is primarily affected by time, health literacy, and physiological factors, mainly seen in the training session. QSEN’s patient safety competency captures inadequacy in educating patients on medication (Kouta et al., 2021).

To therefore keep patients safer, a system must be in place to educate patients effectively even when the staff available are few. Nurses should consequently be competent, innovative, and time conscious in ensuring that patients are well educated. They should have in mind that when patients’ education is insufficiently provided, there mergers risks such as medication errors and non-adherence to treatment. These effects are hazardous and might lead to death if not physical impairments lowering peoples’ trust in attending therapy in such a health facility.

Additionally, only verbal medication instruction is provided in the hospital due to insufficient staff. Written education is not readily available on the ward, and finding and printing information for patients takes effort (Thomas et al., 2019). Furthermore, when educating patients, the author’s section frequently encounters health literacy and physiological hurdles. Nurses with a master’s degree can use patient safety KSAs to improve drug communication, leading to better patient outcomes, thus reducing errors in medication. They must clarify to their patients about medication using the most up-to-date evidence-based methods.

Examining the systems to educate patients and analyze, plan, utilize, and assess improves patient training techniques. In addition, master’s degree nurses should have the mindset of constantly reviewing patient attention, both independently and as an organization. The KSAs can help masterfully equipped health workers improve patient wellbeing in drugs administration.

Proposal Statement and Solution

Medication errors due to insufficient staff are to be addressed by using the patient’s medication education package. The healthcare workers will pick some patients who show progressive responses to medication and adhere to treatment procedures appropriately. This proposal aims to improve patients’ treatment education by enhancing their knowledge in medicine, their use, and side effects on the HCAPS tally (Keers et al., 2018). This will be made possible by printing medication documents and training sessions for all patients on drugs handling. With the implementation of these techniques and training back methods, healthcare workers will be able to use the KSAs in association with the QSEN competency on patient safety to improve patient treatment outcomes.

Since the patients are short-staying, educating them on different drug use should start as soon as possible. Patient training, mainly released from treatment, should be continuing through a patient’s clinic period. Unwritten training is always insufficient; thus, printed material should also be delivered. Printed material reinforces anything being trained and offers patients with entree to information. Patients also believe that taking printed material about drugs and their adverse impacts improves their happiness.

Furthermore, integrating written and verbal information can significantly improve knowledge retention by helping nurses and patients to communicate more effectively. Instructional handouts allow people to remember knowledge better when they have memory problems (Ko et al., 2018). Leaflets, such as prescription information, can assist a nurse in guiding a lesson and engaging patients in education communication. In addition, patient fulfillment tallies on the HCAPHS assessment associated with medicine side influences training enhanced by 45% after spending numerous prescription training and applying the training back method.

The training-back technique permits nurses to inspect what a patient is familiar with by interrogations, emphasis, or offer response on areas that were not understood, and then analyze whether or not the patient has retained the knowledge given.

Implementation Plan

An inclusive method that cooperates both the patients and the nurse is effective in this proposal. Medication education will serve best when training back mode is presented to the hospital staff for approval. The staff and the author are to work closely to develop educational material used in verbal and nonverbal training. The education will be done in a conference room in a unit where flyers will be posted. A PowerPoint presentation will be used for training, and nurses will be required to attend one session a week.

Handouts on these prescriptions would be printed from Micromedex Care Notes the week after the list is compiled, with the agreement of the nurse manager, as the budget allows. Nurses would benefit from having handouts readily available at nursing stations to help them overcome the time limitation. Nurses will be trained to access Micromedex Care Notes to print out information as needed, as not all drugs will have readily available handouts due to cost. Before deploying the medicine education bundle, this teaching would be done at huddle every morning for a month.

The author and the nurse will formulate and manage the developed admission folder with the available tools. The folders will consist of questions that include the type of medication, the reason for taking them, and the possible side effects of the medicines. The folder will be placed in the room where patients are admitted, and other important documents about the medication will be found there. This will help health workers available manage their time effectively while attending to other patients. By using the admission folders with questions, patients are recommended to ask questions about their medication to understand better the disease they treat and its side effects. This will increase patients’ HCAPHS tally outcome regarding medication training.

Nurse leaders would round on patients from the beginning of the education package’s implementation to ensure that admission files and medication handouts were being given to patients. The nurse manager or nurse administrator, who would inquire about their drugs’ purpose and side effects, would follow up with patients. This information would be gathered to ensure that nurses followed the original assignment’s instructions and understood if patients remembered prescription material well. Moreover, evaluation of the HCAPHS study tallies on treatment statements before implementation is critical.

Following the implementation of the medication education package, these data would be compared to HCAPHS survey results. The HCAPH survey results would be used to evaluate the medication education package after four months of implementation (Di Simone et al., 2018). According to evidence-based research, more patients are likely to respond positively to the purpose of new medications and side effects, resulting in higher patient satisfaction and safer patient care. According to the author, the results of the nurse leader rounding and the HCAPHS survey are expected to reveal that a medication education package is a successful tool.

Conclusion

Patients will receive high-quality and safe care if a prescription-training package is executed, entailing a mixture of teaching and the employment and training back method. The time constraint will also be minimized once the patients know the medication to take and the side effects they can comfortably administer. Medication errors will equally reduce even though the nurse population will still be less. Knowledge retention should therefore improve if patients are allowed to learn in a variety of methods. Medication no adherence, readmission rates, and patient adverse events can be reduced with these training techniques. The community at large will also fill a sense of participation in dealing with their diseases and be willing to be diagnosed, thus building trust.

Patient satisfaction and health outcomes can be improved by successfully communicating about patient medication and side effects utilizing multiple messages and the training method. The drug education package may be a massive success with the health worker manager, administrator coordinating, educators, and all other health workers on the unit. More staff’s prescription education and employment would be proven successful by associating HCAPHS assessment discoveries after some months of enactment to reimplement HCAPHS assessment outcomes concerning medicine errors due to insufficient staff.

References

Di Simone, E., Giannetta, N., Auddino, F., Cicotto, A., Grilli, D., & Di Muzio, M. (2018). Medication errors in the emergency department: Knowledge, attitude, behavior, and training needs of nurses. Indian Journal of Critical Care Medicine, 22(5), 346. Web.

Keers, R. N., Plácido, M., Bennett, K., Clayton, K., Brown, P., & Ashcroft, D. M. (2018). What causes medication administration errors in a mental health hospital? A Qualitative Study with Nursing Staff. Plos One, 3(10), e0206233. Web.

Ko, M., Wagner, L., & Spetz, J. (2018). Nursing home implementation of health information technology: Review of the literature finds inadequate investment in preparation, infrastructure, and training. INQUIRY: The Journal of Health Care Organization, Provision, and Financing, 55, 0046958018778902. Web.

Kouta, N., Mohamed, H.Y., Sherdi, S.A., El-sherbiny, A.M., Alaraby, H.E.S., Wahid, A.M., Hatab, H.A., Salem, M.E.S. and Dahroug, E.H., (2021). How to use quality tools to eliminate medication errors. Medicine Updates, 5(5), 96-111.

Rishoej, R. M., Almarsdóttir, A. B., Christesen, H. T., Hallas, J., & Kjeldsen, L. J. (2017). Medication errors in pediatric inpatients: A study based on a national mandatory reporting system. European Journal of Pediatrics, 176(12), 1697-1705. Web.

Shindul-Rothschild, J., Flanagan, J., Stamp, K. D., & Read, C. Y. (2017). Beyond the pain scale: Provider communication and staffing predictive of patients’ satisfaction with pain control. Pain Management Nursing, 8(6), 401-409. Web.

Thomas, B., Paudyal, V., MacLure, K., Pallivalapila, A., McLay, J., El Kassem, W., Al Hail, M., Stewart, D. (2019). Medication errors in hospitals in the Middle East: A systematic review of prevalence, nature, severity and contributory factors. European Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, 5(9), 1269-1282. Web.

Waszak, P. M., Kasprzycka-Waszak, W., & Kubanek, A. (2018). The spread of medical fake news in social media–The pilot quantitative study. Health policy and technology, 7(2), 115-118. Web.

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