Common Medication Errors In Nursing

In a health care setting, nurses in the provision of care of patients have a wide range of responsibilities such as guaranteeing value and ensuring medication safety whilst administering oral medication. However, during administering medications nurses often find their patients injured by common medication errors. Danger to medication safety is due to nurses being predisposed to factors including lack of knowledge and understanding of the medications being controlled, miscommunications amongst nurses and other health care workers, as well as the overwhelming heavy workload nurses are confronted with. Nurses play a significant role in ensuring a medication safety environment for all patients in their provision of care; therefore it is vital …show more content…
The heavy workloads predispose nurses to making common medication errors consequently becoming difficult to ensure medication safety for patients who are in the provision of care of nurses. Stratton, Blegen, Pepper and Vaughn (2004) have found in a case study that nurses reported staffing ratios and the amount of drugs being administered as being one of the main reasons why common medication errors occur. Another survey reported by Tang, Sheu, Yu, Wei and Chen (2007) have found that nurses from Taiwan also reported that a significant contributing factor to drug errors was due to strenuous workload. This depicts that, the heavy workload in a health care setting for nurses affects nurses to make common medication errors increasingly. Eslamian, Taheri, Bahrami and Mojdeh (2010), also make it evident through their case study which shows that the heavy workloads as well as nurses having to stay back at work are common reasons for making medication errors. The excessive workload nurses face in a health care surrounding predisposes nurses to make common medication errors subsequently making it almost difficult to ensure medication safety whilst administering medication to