Quality Improvement Project. Health, Medicine, Nursing

Quality Improvement Project
Name
Institutional Affiliate
Quality Improvement Project
Working Project Title
Medication Safety: promoting safe prescriptions, dispensing, and administration of medicine, and monitoring the use of medications and increasing patient information.
Lay Summary
Patient safety makes for one of the major concerns and principle elements or objectives in the delivery of quality care for the health care system in Australia and around the world. The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care recognizes the fact that the delivery of quality care to patients around the world is an intense process requiring a comprehensive approach for ensuring its achievement. Hospital-acquired health problems arising or rather emerging from and in the process of delivering patient care tend to compromise patient safety. A report published by the ACSQHC IN 2019 indicates that hospital-acquired health issues lead to increased hospital admissions in the country, which accounts for a total expenditure of approximately $4.1 billion by the public sector (ACSQHC, 2019a). It is for such reasons that the nation adopted a holistic approach in the development of an effective framework for addressing the underlying factors challenging the delivery of quality care through enhanced patient safety. Among the areas of concern identified by the ACSQHC-led initiative include hospital-related health issues arising from the occurrence of medication errors. An interventional measure towards addressing the problem makes for one of the proposed quality standards referred to as medication safety, which is documented in the ACSQHC reports dubbed, The State of Patient Safety and Quality in Australian Hospitals 2019. Medication safety makes for one of the provisions contained in the National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards (NSQHS) that function to promote patient safety across the Australian health care system.
The quality improvement project is thus informed by the ACSQHC’s proposed standard of medication safety and functions to promote the delivery of quality care by enhancing patient safety through the reduction of medication errors across the Australian health care system (ACSQHC, 2019b). The quality improvement project thrives on the effective analysis and evaluation of the proposed measures towards addressing the patient safety concern. The project thus entails the development of an understanding of the problem of medication errors concerning the scope of occurrence, contributory factors to their perpetuation, as well as the proposed interventional measures and their efficacy in addressing the patient safety concern. In essence, the project sets to inform on the appropriate measures for enhancing patient safety through the analysis and evaluation of the provisions of medication safety standards as outlined in the ACSQHC reports and the effect of their implementation as documented in the Patient Safety Surveillance Unit’s reports.
Project Details
Improving medication safety plays a significant role in the delivery of quality care through enhanced patient safety. Reiterating on the description of the safety standard as outlined in the ACSQHC reports, medication safety functions to provide an effective framework for ensuring competence among clinicians by encouraging safe prescribing, dispensing, and administration of medicines to patients across the Australian health care system (ACSQHC, 2019b). The standard also emphasizes monitoring of medication use among patients and increasing their knowledge of the appropriate use of medication. Medication errors can be defined as the occurrence of inappropriate actions in the prescription, dispensing, transcribing, and administering of medicines that lead to preventable harm to patients in the process of delivering patient care (WHO, 2016). It is, therefore, evident that such medical incidents occur during the process of delivering medication care and may also include the failure to monitor the use of medication and the impact of the same on the patients (ACSQHC, 2019a & 2019b). Inappropriate or rather the incorrect use of medication among patients due to lack of knowledge over the impacts of such actions also makes for one of the common instances of medication errors occurring in the primary care settings of Australia’s health care system. According to the Patient Safety Surveillance Unit reports on the implementation of the medication standard across the Western Australian region, administration medication errors (AMEs) make up the most frequent medication incidents reported. Administration medication errors may include incorrect dosage, offering incorrect medication, and the use of wrong channels or routes in administering the same (Patient Safety Surveillance Unite, 2017, 2018, 2019). Delivering medication care to the wrong patient and incorrect timing of delivering medications to patients also make up the medication errors registered in Australian health care systems and around the world (ASHP, 2017). Prescription and dispensing errors also contribute to the cases of medication errors reported across various health facilities in the Western Australian region. The medical incidents reported from the two stages of the medication process take the form of providing a medication regimen without investigating the patient’s problem during prescription and inaccurate calculations of the dosage when dispensing the medication (Cheragi, 2013).
Aims and Objectives
Reports by the ACSQHC highlight the magnitude of the problem in the country with statistics indicating that approximately 230, 000 patients are admitted across the nation’s health care system due to medication errors committed in the process of receiving care each year. Medication errors have different repercussions on patients that vary in severity ranging from no harm to serious life injuries including death. The cost of such medication incidents stands at approximately $660 million in annual expenditure across the Australian health care system in the effort to mitigate the adverse effects of medication errors on patients (ACSQHC, 2019b). The same trend is witnessed across other health care systems across the globe with the United States and the United Kingdom recording even higher cases of medication error incidents (Wittich, 2014). The quality improvement project thus endeavors to ensure the achievement of the outlined objectives of the medication safety standard through the application of effective interventional measures against the health care problem of medication errors. In essence, the quality improvement project functions to deal with the adverse effects of medication errors on Australia’s health care system by enhancing patient safety through effective implementation of the proposed interventional measures. The project endeavors to achieve the said objectives by tactfully addressing the underlying factors contributing to the escalation of medication incidents in the delivery of health care services.
Quality Improvement Intervention
Human contributory factors identified by Patient Safety Surveillance Unit’s reports include lack of knowledge and skills among care providers and patient factors such as poor interpretation of medication usage due to lack of information on medication usage(Patient Safety Surveillance Unit, 2019 & Flotta, 2012). Other factors contributing to the occurrence of such errors include distractions, fatigue and stress among the care providers, staff shortages in health care facilities, and the subsequent heavy workloads (Bravo, 2016 & Crayon, 2010). Proposed interventional measures by the ACSQHC include integrating interventional measures against medication incidents with the set medication policies within health care facilities around the nation (ACSQHC, 2019). Advanced documentation of patient information, management of medication in continued care, and effective management of the medications or drugs also constitute the proposed interve...