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 lead during taxi, takeoff or arrival could first to a critical error. Apparently the same is true of nurses who prepare and administer medication to medical centre patients going here. A new study shows that interrupting nurses while they're tending to patients' medication needs increases the chances of error.

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

For instance, four interruptions in the order of a single drug administration doubled the good chance that the patient would experience a major mishap, according to the study, reported in the April 26 problem 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 material evidence to identifying the contributing factors and circumstances that can leash 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 strain members don't take it that it's dangerous to patient safety to interrupt nurses while they're working," added Linda Flynn, collaborator professor at the University of Maryland School of Nursing in Baltimore. "I have seen my own brood members go out and interrupt the nurse when she's standing at a medication barrow 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 monotonous that person involved - nurses, health-care workers, patients and families -- has become complacent. "We penury to reframe this in a new light, which is, it's an important, perilous function," Kliger said. "We need to give it the respect that it is due because it is high volume, high peril and, if we don't do it right, there's patient harm and it costs money".