The Importance Of Medication Errors

Whether people realize or not, medication errors are inevitable in healthcare settings. People make medication errors with medicines they are prescribed to take at home. Why will medication errors continue to happen? Regardless of the setting, we are all human beings, therefore we are not perfect and will make mistakes. However, medication errors have been decreased through taken certain precautions and technology improvements. Nurses are taught from the beginning of nursing school to utilize the patient medication rights with every medication administration. If the patient medication rights are not followed there can be serious and/or life threatening results. As a new nurse my medication error was giving the wrong dose of insulin and it is a mistake I will never forget. …show more content…
The orders for insulin administration can be easily misunderstood. There are many different types or insulin orders, and a patient can have multiple ordered for one time. Insulin administration can become complicated, especially when most of our patient population cannot eat or drink anything. There are numerous ways medication errors can occur. My first medication error involved insulin administration. I was still on orientation at my first job. My patient had a standing dose of insulin ordered for his lunch meal, as well as a sliding scale order for insulin. The standing dose means he will receive the ordered dose as long as his blood sugar was above seventy and he was going to eat. The sliding scale determines how much extra units of insulin he will receiving depending on how high his blood sugar was at lunch time. So my administration of insulin became a medication error when I ended up giving an extra dose of insulin. Human error was the