In the article “A controlled trial of smart infusion pumps to improve medication safety in critically ill patients” the authors, Rothschild et al., identified the need to improve medication administrations through the use of intravenous pumps (2005). The goal of the research study was to assess medication errors, the causes for the errors, how smart pumps impacted (both negatively and positively) medication errors, and how patient safety can be improved. They recognized that little research had been done regarding the direct effects of infusion pumps and how they prevent or even cause medication errors. The randomized time-series study was conducted at Bridgham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts in the cardiac surgical intensive
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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
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