Diverting A Nurse In The Preparation Of Medicines Increases The Risk Of Errors

Diverting A Nurse In The Preparation Of Medicines Increases The Risk Of Errors.
Distracting an airline airman during taxi, takeoff or deplaning could chief to a critical error. Apparently the same is true of nurses who prepare and administer medication to health centre patients. A new study shows that interrupting nurses while they're tending to patients' medication needs increases the chances of error.

As the sum of distractions increases, so do the number of errors and the endanger to patient safety. "We found that the more interruptions a nurse received while administering a drug to a determined patient, the greater the risk of a serious error occurring," said the study's lead author, Johanna I Westbrook, commander of the Health Informatics Research and Evaluation Unit at the University of Sydney in Australia.

For instance, four interruptions in the lecture of a single drug administration doubled the probability that the patient would experience a major mishap, according to the study, reported in the April 26 efflux of the Archives of Internal Medicine. Experts say the study is the first to show a clear association between interruptions and medication errors.

It "lends mighty evidence to identifying the contributing factors and circumstances that can bring to a medication error," said Carol Keohane, program director for the Center of Excellence for Patient Safety Research and Practice at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. "Patients and blood members don't agree that it's dangerous to patient safety to interrupt nurses while they're working," added Linda Flynn, secondary professor at the University of Maryland School of Nursing in Baltimore. "I have seen my own family tree members go out and interrupt the nurse when she's standing at a medication haul to ask for an extra towel or something else inappropriate".

Julie Kliger, who serves as program director of the Integrated Nurse Leadership Program at the University of California, San Francisco, said that administering medication has become so stereotypic that Dick involved - nurses, health-care workers, patients and families -- has become complacent. "We requirement to reframe this in a new light, which is, it's an important, deprecating function. We need to give it the respect that it is due because it is high volume, high risk and, if we don't do it right, there's determined harm and it costs money".