The authors worked with smart pumps with a preprogrammed drug library that aids the nurse in programming the pump with a given medication. The mistake of a decimal point resulting in a delivery of excessive or insufficient medication would generate an alert notifying the programmer that this was out of the normal limit. These pumps also had alarms indicating occlusions, air bubbles, and free-flow protection. The authors stated that nurses were capable of overriding the drug library and run the drug as a nonspecific or generic infusion as there were some drugs not included in the preprogrammed library. The researchers identified several practices by staff which they deemed “risky behaviors.” These included the bypassing of medications which were programmable through the drug library, overrides of warning alerts, and verbal orders from doctors which went undocumented. The study showed 219 intravenous medication error and the most common type of error occurred with titratable drugs such as vasopressors (Rotchschild et al., …show more content…
There were doctors, nurses, sociologists, a PhD, and an MS listed. Interdisciplinary collaboration adds multiple different perspectives and ultimately strengthens the experiment. For example, if the study was done without a nurse participating, the other researchers may not realize that medications can be overridden, or the need to have an introductory period of two weeks before the study is started. A sociologist and one with a masters in science are vital members as they typically have the most experience in conducting a research