Medication Administration Errors in Nursing
Thread Title: “Medication Administration Errors in Nursing”
1.Thread
Thread Title: “Medication Administration Errors in Nursing”
Nurses strive for perfection, but the work environment is pressuring, and often nurses make mistakes that can jeopardize a patient’s safety and health outcomes. Most mistakes involving nurses at work are unintentional; nonetheless, they can bear legal upshots if they lead to adverse events or a patient decides to push ahead with a lawsuit. Patient safety is an indicator of the quality of health and other significant aspects of protocol adherence (Mahrous, 2018). Nurses’ primary role is to ensure patients receive the needed care, promoting their health and well-being. Nurses promote quality of care and patient safety by supporting patients in their recovery journey and after discharge. Throughout my career, I have been involved in several mistakes, some life-changing, particularly in the first years of practice. I will discuss a nursing mistake I was involved in during my clinical placement.
2. Call Dibs
“Alarm Fatigue Is Real”
3. Read Essay
“Alarm Fatigue Is Real”
4. Response to Essay
Plot
The essay is about alarm fatigue and its impact on care. The author discusses alarm fatigue in general, pointing out contributing factors, how it occurs, how nurses deal with alarms that constantly go off, and the potential impact on patient outcomes. The author then discusses a personal experience with alarm fatigue and how it affected the patient and clinical outcomes. Finally, the author provides lessons from this experience and recommends an improvement on the system because the current one is not as effective as intended, contributing to nursing burnout. The author recommends a system that would stop going off when the patient has achieved desired or within-normal vital signs and also recommends a better way to connect the patient to the monitor because the sticker approach leads to inaccurate readings and constant alarms when it falls off, especially when a patient is constantly moving, typical in pediatric care. (Medication Administration Errors in Nursing)
Personal Feelings
Alarm fatigue is a patient safety issue because, in most cases, nurses switch off alarms that go off constantly and sometimes fail to notice when the patient needs help. Also, the sticker falling off the patient leads to incorrect readings impacting clinical decisions. The author’s experience shows how challenging the healthcare environment is and how environmental factors affect nursing practice, including providing quality and safe care. The high exposure to medical alarms can be tiring and frustrating, leading to harm desensitization from missed alarms, meaning nurses might respond late, which can be detrimental to the patient. (Medication Administration Errors in Nursing)
Purpose of Sharing
The author’s primary purpose is to discuss how alarm fatigue impacts nursing practice and patient outcomes. This experience seems significant to the author and a fundamental learning experience that was life-changing and majorly impacting future practice. In such a situation, the outcome can be a patient’s death, which new nurses can find difficulty dealing with. Therefore, sharing this patient encounter elaborates more on nursing responsibility and how factors can impact nurses’ effectiveness in deliberating the responsibility.
Personal Experience that Connects with Author’s
I can relate to this experience because medical device alarms are also common at the workplace, and the frequency of the alarms determines nurses’ development of alarm fatigue. Frequent alarms are tiring and frustrating because more than half of the alarms are false, and you end up running up and down or leaving a current task to respond to a false one. It is a sensory overload that leads to desensitization because, in some instances, I have failed to respond immediately, especially when the alarm seems false. I understand this can be dangerous, but I can wait to see if another nurse is calling before moving in to help. Other nurses calling for assistance seems a more effective way of responding to an emergency because it is never a false alarm.
Something from my Learning that may Interest the Author
Interestingly, alarm fatigue is well-documented and is recognized by the Joint Commission National Patient Safety Goal as a patient safety issue. Patient deaths have been associated with alarm fatigue linked to missed alarms and delayed responses. However, there are strategies I can recommend to adopt at the healthcare organization to help address the problem, including alarm parameter customization and using adopting electrocardiogram electrode changes to minimize false alarms. (Medication Administration Errors in Nursing)
Theme to Explore
Alarm fatigue has been widely researched, but interventions to address the problem and promote patient safety need more research. I would be interested in exploring how AI and other contemporary technologies can help address the problem and replace the stickers, which often fall off, leading to false alarms.
Keywords
1.Alarm fatigue*
2.Impact of alarm fatigue on patient safety*
3.Alarm fatigue best practices
4.Nurses’ perspectives on alarm fatigue*
5.Theoretical underpinnings of alarm fatigue
6.Hospital policy and procedure to decrease alarm fatigue
5. Do Research
Article selected:
Claudio, D., Deb, S., & Diegel, E. (2021). A Framework to Assess Alarm Fatigue Indicators in Critical Care Staff. Critical care explorations, 3(6), e0464. https://doi.org/10.1097/CCE.0000000000000464
6. Share the Article
Authors: Claudio et al.
Publication year: 2021
Article full title: A Framework to Assess Alarm Fatigue Indicators in Critical Care Staff
Functional Link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8205220/
Database: PubMed Central
Justification: I selected the article because it goes overboard to assess work-related and personality factors influencing providers’ experience with alarm fatigue. The article posits that individualities can impact behavior towards alarm fatigue and recommends alternative strategies like work rotation, shift reduction, and breaks to reduce alarm fatigue. (Medication Administration Errors in Nursing)
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