Va Outpatient Hospital Medication Error

Will the veterans at the VA Outpatient clinic have fewer medication errors in the implementation of a barcode administration system compared to those not using barcode the medication system, result in decreased medication error rate over a period of a year. This is the question that will be presented for this this research proposal. Medication errors occur daily and are steadily on a rise. According to Seibert (2014), adverse drug events has risen to 450, 000 annually from medication errors that resulted in injury, of which approximately 25% are preventable. A common medication errors include “prescribing errors, wrong drug, wrong dosage, incorrect calculation, not confirming allergies, and failure to adjust medication dose due to disease

There will be the two VA outpatient clinics, with 100 veterans from each facility that will participate in the study. Over a 12-month period, the rate of errors will be determined by a pre and post implementation of the barcode medication administration system within the two VA outpatient clinics. Based another studies, over a years’ time, the physicians wrote approximately 1.7 million medication orders, and the nurses who passed the medications, there were approximately 5.9 million given. Based on the design, error rates were compared with hospital’s who had the BCMA, versus the hospital who did not (Poon et al., 2010). It was later noted that the rate of medication errors significantly decreased with the use of the BCMC.

Setting/sample: Briefly describe the setting for the study, who your study participants will be, and how these participants will be chosen. Will random sampling or a sample of convenience be used?

The setting will the veteran patients at the VA outpatient clinic, on similar unit. There will be convenience sample of 100 veterans from each facility for this study. The first VA outpatient clinic already have the barcode medication system in place and the second VA outpatient clinics does not, which the medications are given by

Trained research nurses will observe administering of medication for appropriateness. According to Poon (2010), direct observation methods will be used to measure error rates. The research nurses will shadow the nurses during medication administration of the first 100 veteran patients, that agree to the study. During direct observation, this allows the research nurse to record detailed information regarding the medication that is administered to the veteran patient. At this time, if the research nurse feels that a medication was administered erroneously, the researcher can intercept, and record this information regarding the attempt to administered a medication error by this nurse. The medication errors are defined as timing, and transcribing. Data will be collected in addition to any incident reports. The study will use a monitoring system that is use surveillance of adverse drug events (ADEs) for reporting system for observed and new ADEs at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) medical facilities (VA, 2014). VA ADERS allows individuals to report, track, and electronically submit serious adverse drug events to the FDA’s MedWatch system (VA, 2014). This would be the way to gather baseline data and measure the