What are medication administration errors?
Medication administration error (MAE) is defined as “any difference between what the patient received or was supposed to receive and what the prescriber intended in the original order” [2].
What are the most common medication administration errors?
The three most common dispensing errors are: dispensing an incorrect medication, dosage strength or dosage form; miscalculating a dose; and failing to identify drug interactions or contraindications. Errors caused by drug administration can be made by the health care provider or by the patient themselves.
What are the 3 most common drug related errors?
As such, it is important to adhere to scheduled times as commonly; this may lead to under or overdosing.
- Incorrect Dose. This error includes overdose, underdose, and an extra dose.
- Distractions. One of the major causes of medication errors is distraction.
- Illegible Writing.
- Systems-Based Drug Safety.
What are the types of medication errors?
Types of medication error and prevention
| Type of error | Example |
|---|---|
| . | |
| Action based | Being distracted, writing diazepam for diltiazem |
| Technical | Writing illegibly, so that ‘Panadol’ (paracetamol) is dispensed instead of ‘Priadel’ (lithium)a |
| Memory based | Forgetting to specify a maximum daily dose for an ‘as required’ drug |
Why are medication errors a problem?
Medication errors can have undesirable consequences for patients such as: Increased length of hospitalization, increased costs of hospitalization, disability and distrust in the healthcare system, severe injury or even patient death (Webster & Anderson, 2002).
What is an example of a medication error?
An example of a medication error is taking an over-the-counter product that contains acetaminophen (Tylenol, others) when you’re already taking a prescription pain medicine that contains this exact ingredient.
What kinds of errors do nurses make regarding the administration of medications?
Most of the medications are administered by nurses [7]. The frequently perpetrated types of MAEs include wrong dose, wrong time, wrong drug, wrong route, omission of doses, wrong patient, lack of documentation, and technical errors [8,9,10,11].
How do nurses deal with drug errors?
How to deal with medication errors
- Establish the extent of the problem. Dealing with your patient’s clinical wellbeing must of course be the first step.
- Sources of information.
- Inform the patient.
- Put it right where possible.
- Reporting.
- Investigate further and review systems.
What are common medical errors?
[1] Among the problems that commonly occur during providing health care are adverse drug events and improper transfusions, misdiagnosis, under and over treatment, surgical injuries and wrong-site surgery, suicides, restraint-related injuries or death, falls, burns, pressure ulcers, and mistaken patient identities.