Continuous Quality Improvement in Managing Medication Errors

HSC 350 Week 13: Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) in Managing Medication Errors
Name of Student
Institutional Affiliation
Course
Professor
Date
Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) in Managing Medication Errors
Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) is a critical practice in healthcare. CQI strategies bridge gaps between evidence-based practice and what precisely occurs in healthcare practice. CQI approaches are geared towards improving and optimizing health outcomes. CQI encapsulates activities and processes geared towards identifying quality-related challenges, developing solutions, and implementing and evaluating health transformational measures. The strategies deployed to improve the quality, safety, and efficiency of health care delivery, have often concentrated on shifting approaches detailing how such services are organized and delivered. CQI is often applied in industrial and manufacturing sectors, but it increasingly gains attention and healthcare use. More often, the CQI matches with Six AIMS, as enshrined in the Institute of Medicine’s report. The Six AIMS include patient-centered care, patient safety, timeliness or responsive care, efficient care, effective care, and equitable care. This paper discusses the application of CQI in managing and controlling medication errors.
Medication Errors in healthcare
What are medication errors? According to World Health Organization (2016), consensus regarding a precise definition of a medication error or errors is lacking. However, from systematic literature reviews, one can get an idea about medication errors' meaning and interpretation. A medication error may refer to an avoidable occurrence that can contribute to inappropriate medication use or patient harm while such a drug or pharmaceutical product is in the control of the health provider or patient (Hincapie,2020: Horn,2020). Thus, it implies that medication errors are preventable and are often committed by people who handle drugs, not only healthcare providers but also patients or consumers.
Medication errors are prevalent in healthcare. They substantially contributed to unintended harm to patients, including increased adversities, compromised safety, and increased healthcare costs (Cloete, 2015: Hill et al., 2017). Medication errors in the U.S raise patient safety concerns causing harm to patients, such as permanent disability, congenital disabilities, hospitalization, and death (Hincapie, 2020). Medication errors can be directly linked to professional practice factors, healthcare products, procedures, systemic limitations, disenfranchised prescribing, deranged order communication, and wrong product labeling World Health Organization (2016). Errors can also be contributed by mistakes in product-compounding, drug-dispensing, distribution, and drug administration. Medication errors can be quality-related events, which are comprised of all events that reach the patient. Quality-related events include incorrect drug, dose ad amount (Hincapie, 2020). It can also include intercepted medications prior to dispensing, i.e., near misses.
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) shows that community pharmacies dispense about three billion medications annually. These prescriptions lead to about 1.5 million errors annually (Hincapie, 2020). The Institute for in 2020, a New York Times series, cited increased workload, leading to a substantial disregard for safety protocols (Hincapie, 2020). Prescribing errors often lead to a significant portion of all medication errors, thereby, is considered an underlying factor in causing harm to patients (Awan & Mathew, 2020). Challenges in education, and drug monitoring, and use, can increase exposure to medication errors. The prevalent pharmaceutical malpractices leading to medication errors include overdosing, failure to provide instructions, contaminated drugs, labeling errors, and preparation errors (Horn,2020).
The increasing medication use is linked to the growing risk of harm. The harm is exacerbated ever-increasing necessity to prescribe medications for an aging population with co-morbidities and complex health needs. The growing research studies on medication errors are commonly hospital-based, but variations exist in terms of clinical problems, medications class used, and the organizational frameworks in primary care (World Health Organization,2016). Thus, the risks present in primary care and its controlling strategies may contrast with those in hospital settings (World Health Organization,2016). Cloete observes that preventing medication errors strategies should be implemented at every stage and process, including drug distribution, dispensing, and administration and about 30 % of medication errors happen in the administration phase.
CQI in Managing Medication Errors
Medication errors constitute major safety concerns to patients. It is an area of practice that CQI should focus on. The use of CQI by organizations can enhance patient safety (Hincapie, 2020). CQI is a management process. It entails continuous and systematic evaluation of an organization’s processes to enhance performance via identification of the underlying causes of poor outcomes (Hincapie, 2020). CQI program's goal involves detecting, documenting, and assessing prescription errors to identify the cause, develop a suitable response, and prevent future errors (Horn,2020). According to Horn (2020), adopting approaches to resolving root causes of medication errors is an optimal approach to preventing the recurrence of similar challenges. The essentials of a standardized CQI project include reporting, documenting, analyzing, and shared learning (Horn 2020)
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) has presented incredible reports illuminating safety standards regarding medication. For instance, the IOM report “To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System “was enlightening on core strategies that can help prevent errors, improve patients’ safety (Billstein-Leber et al.,2018). The purpose of medication interventions is defined by health outcomes that are marked by improving patient’s quality of life while limiting the potential patient risk. Thus, medication errors could conflict and defeat the purpose.
The IOM reported the healthcare framework's inability in the U.S fails to deliver high-quality medical care (Aragon & Dand,2016). The IOM advanced six aims to track and control the quality of healthcare. These six aims included safety, equitability effectiveness, efficiency, patient-centeredness, and timeliness. The CQI should align its strategies with these six aims. Patient-centeredness involves providing care that matches individual needs. There is a need for client-centric services. The notion of patient-centeredness means that medication that is prescribed and administered must be tailored to meet patient health conditions, incorrect dosage, and frequency (Bailie et al.,2017). Second, the second point involves the effectiven...