The culture and environment of safety

Medication Administration

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Medication Administration
What should the culture and environment of safety look like when preparing and administering medications?
Patients are the primary clients of medical institutions committed to saving lives and reducing the injuries caused by diseases. Therefore, all medical facilities ensure that all the systems involved result in maximum results for the patient. Patient safety is one of the major health disciplines that nurses and all practitioners are trained to know well. It is a field that changes from time to time with the improvement of technology and the emerging concerns in increased harm to patients in health facilities (Ammouri et al., 2015). Patient safety aims at reducing errors, risks, and harms that occur to the patients when undergoing medical care. These are achieved through teaching and training the practitioners to develop a safe culture and environment. Safety culture can be described as shared perceptions of an organization, beliefs, attitudes, and values that are put together to create a commitment, effort, and responsibility to minimize harm to the clients. A nurse who wants to create a culture and environment of safety when preparing to administer medication should consider the following: know the institution’s policies where they work, especially on the administration of medicine (Ammouri et al., 2015). They should ascertain that they have the right medications, which should only be taken from written prescriptions. They should ensure that they take the right medications and know how they are administered. Finally, they should avoid distractions like talking when preparing and administering medication.
Discuss a common breach of medication administration
Unsafe medication practices majorly cause patient harm in . These harms are often avoidable when care and the right procedures are followed well. Nurses are at the center of the medication errors that occur and they are the ones who can prevent these errors. The most common type of breach of medication administration is the wrong time, wrong or missing dose, and wrong medication. The most common contributing factor to these errors and breaches is the lack of pharmaceutical knowledge (Hrknen et al., 2017). Nurses’ health illiteracy is a major problem and a risk to patient safety. Some common instance is abbreviations in labelling or naming medications which is a major cause of miscommunication in healthcare facilities.
Identify three (3) factors that lead to errors in the documentation related to medication administration
Patient safety is much dependent on medication documentation done by the nurses taking care of them. Poor results and potential harm can result from poor or lack of documentation. Proper documentation shows the patient’s medical records and progress to ensure that the nurse does not go off the medication. Some factors that lead to documentation errors in healthcare include inadequate record-keeping literacy (Hrknen et al., 2017). It can be an influence of the changes in technology where some nurses might not be knowledgeable in handling them. Some do not know how to switch between manual and . Other factors include the increase in the population of patients, which may lead to a mix-up of medical records of one patient with other ones. Another major factor is the lack of communication between the nurses and doctors or patients. It mostly happens in events of shifts of taking care of the patient where one nurse does not give updates of the activities that they did to the patient.
What can I do to prevent medication errors?
Medication errors can be prevented by first having the right health knowledge to handle medication. Nurses should ensure they know and follow the five rights of medication administration: the right prescription, patient, dosage, mode or route of administration, and right time (Ammouri et al., 2015). There should be for all activities. The nurse should follow proper medication procedures. The labels of medications should be well-read and ensure that the medications are properly stored for proper efficacy. Finally, the nurse should be aware of the institutions medication administration regulations, policies, and guidelines.

References
Ammouri, A. A., Tailakh, A. K., Muliira, J. K., Geethakrishnan, R., & Al Kindi, S. N. (2015). Patient safety culture among nurses.International Nursing Review,62(1), 102-110.
Hrknen, M., Saano, S., & VehvilinenJulkunen, K. (2017). Using incident reports to inform the prevention of medication administration errors.Journal of Clinical Nursing,26(21-22), 3486-3499.