nursing

Medication administration in hospitals is among the top things listed on the job description and is an essential process during a patients hospitalization, recovery process, and or health maintenance. Nurses are expected to familiarize themselves with medications basic chemical composition, mechanism of action, and their different effects on the body etc. during nursing school; Pharmacology and Advanced Pharmacology. During Introduction to Nursing, in the first semester of nursing school, students are taught the “5 rights of medication administration”: the right patient, the right drug, the right dose, the right route, and the right time. Together with hospital policies, guidelines, standards, and technical implementations (electronic medications administration record, patient identifiers, use of scanners) medication errors should theoretically be close to impossible.

This evidence based practice improvement project aims at further identifying ways in which different hospitals deter medication errors as well as the protocols in place during the event in which one would occur. This project will also focus on factors the lead to medication errors, it will include past and present information that will show progress that has been made and will assist in the main goal of the project which is to attempt to formulate a way to reduce medication errors in hospitals.