Medication Errors: Description, Challenges, and Quality Improvement Process

Overview of Quality in Healthcare
Student Name
Department, University
Course Code: Course Name
Professor
Due Date
Overview of Quality in Healthcare
Introduction
Medication therapy aims to attain specific therapeutic outcomes to improve a patient's life quality while reducing patient risk. There are many unknown and known risks linked to the utilization of medications (nonprescription and prescription). Medication errors are preventable events that could lead to or cause inappropriate medication utilization or patient adverse outcomes. These undesirable outcomes relate to medical products, practices, organizational systems, as well as processes, including activities relating to order communication, prescriptions, drug labelling, packaging, dispensing, supply, patient education, administration, use, and monitoring. This paper discusses medication errors as a patient safety issue and its associated challenges, the use of evidence-based practice, research, and performance improvement processes to address the problem, the sources of data, including process and outcome data, how data will be collected and shared, including necessary organizational culture considerations central to ensuring the success of this endeavor.
Issue Description and Associated Challenges
Patient health and safety are important concepts in contemporary health care organizations (Salar et al., 2020). According to the World Health Organization (WHO), patient safety is "the absence of preventable harm to a patient and reduction of risk of unnecessary harm associated with health care to an acceptable minimum" (Mieiro et al., 2019). Medication errors significantly impact patient safety outcomes and medical care costs and lead to hazards for health system clients and their households. Prescribing medication constitutes an essential duty of a nurse, mainly because the resulting mistakes might have undesirable, severe implications for patients (Salar et al., 2020). According to Manskow and Kristiansen (2021), medication errors lead to significant challenges within the health care system, including deteriorated patient safety, as they potentially reduce life quality, cause morbidity and mortality, as well as increase medical care costs. Medication errors are a patient safety concern, the third leading death cause in the United States (U.S.) and are associated with significant financial costs globally (Manskow & Kristiansen, 2021).
Using EBP, Research, and Quality Improvement to Address the Issue
Evidence-based practice (EBP) is a problem-solving approach to delivering medical care that applies the best evidence from well-defined care data and studies and connects healthcare professionals' values and expertise with patient preferences (Camargo et al., 2018). Healthcare professionals, including nurses and physicians, can use EBP to reduce medication errors by ensuring that prescription procedures are based on currently available research to improve the safety and health of patients while lowering overall costs as well as health outcomes variations caused by such preventable harms (Camargo et al., 2018). For example, evidence-based techniques of prioritizing patient safety practices, including Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) and Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS), can be implemented to prevent prescription errors. Research can be used to address medication errors by identifying specific pharmacological groups with high risks for multi-causality errors. For example, published work indicates that antibacterial drugs are specifically crucial due to their extensive use and the error frequency related to their utilization (Escrivá Gracia et al., 2019). Apart from identifying high-risk groups and high-risk medications, research helps establish critical determinants of patient harm in order to inform practical medication error prevention approaches.
Performance improvement strategies can improve care quality delivered and reduce medication errors. Some of the performance improvement methods to address medication errors include designing effective systems via efficient utilization of technology, building better medication-related processes via teamwork and collaboration, and evaluating and reporting the performance improvement results. For example, pharmacists can engage in interprofessional meetings within the hospital and play a significant role in assessing and evaluating the medication-utilization processes across the facility or the entire healthcare system at large to investigate and enhance structures inclined to encourage procedures that emphasize patient safety (Billstein-Leber et al., 2018). Further, hospital pharmacists can lead multidisciplinary, collaborative efforts to mitigate medication-related issues that could contribute to patient harm.
Quality Improvement Process and Rationale
According to the Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommendations, hospitals should implement the critical domains of quality medical care to address different medication errors. The main domains of quality medical care include safety, timeliness, effectiveness, efficiency, equity, and patient-centeredness (STEEEP). The IOM recommends using STEEEP as an evidence-based quality improvement framework in health care organizations. It is considered a practical approach to achieving continuous quality improvement efforts within hospitals, mainly because existing quality improvement frameworks address some of the domains impacting patient safety outcomes. Safe care involves avoiding injuries or harm to patients from care intended to assist them without inadvertent exposures or accidental mistakes. Timely care should reduce harmful delays and waits that could affect smooth care delivery processes. Effective care entails providing services centered on clinical evid...