Medication Administration Errors Research Proposals Examples

Introduction.

Medication errors are avoidable events that can lead to potentially catastrophic or fatal consequences for the patient. There are a number of ways a medication error may occur: a prescribing error – wrong drug, dose, route or frequency, or the error may fall within the dispensing context: wrong dose given, wrong drug to the wrong patient, wrong route e.g. intravenous instead of intramuscular route. Drug prescribing and dispensing are complicated tasks requiring significant attention to detail and are often carried out under time or task pressure. In this research proposal we intend to study if by minimizing distractions to nurses dispensing medication we can reduce avoidable drug errors. We hypothesize that minimal interruptions when a nurse is passing out medications will lead to a decrease in medication errors.

Methods and procedures

For this research project we will conduct a survey of the day shift nurses on the surgical ward in two different hospitals within the same geographic area. The surgical wards should be of a similar number of beds. The nurses will form the sample of this project. The first set of data to be gathered will look at nurses dispensing medication when they are not wearing tabards, and the second data set will look at the error rates of medication dispensing while wearing tabards. We will need a minimum of 8 nurses/drug rounds to be observed per hospital per data gathering set in order to compare medication error rates between the two hospitals in a statistically useful manner. The survey should be conducted over a period of approximately one week at each hospital, with an equal time split between the two data gathering sets. While nurses conduct their drug round they will be shadowed by the data gatherer – who will not interact with the nurse. Shadowing is not an ideal method of gathering data, as by simply observing the nurse – who will know that they are being observed, we may cause an inadvertent bias or change in dispensing behavior to our results. However, it is a very quick way in which to collect data and can be repeated easily. Furthermore this method of data collection does not rely on nurse recollection of errors or distractions and so is more likely to represent an accurate result.