Patient Safety

Imagine going into the hospital for yourself or a loved one for treatment and instead coming out with more harm than you went in with. Patient safety and security is a huge aspect of the nursing field. When a patient is not feeling well it is the nurse’s job to make sure that the patient is as comfortable as possible despite the situation and most of all it is of even higher priority for the nurse to guarantee patient safety. Hospital time and stays can be very difficult and even upsetting to some patients. The idea of being in unfamiliar surroundings being care for by strangers may add to client’s bad feelings for, but it is still the healthcare team’s responsibility to make sure the patient’s main outcome is to feel better by time of discharge.

To make this possible nurses have countless responsibilities and tasks that involve a great deal of risk, including medication administration which carries one of the leading risks. Some patients suffer irreversible damage due to medication errors while others suffer fatalities. Nurses have traditionally followed the five rights of medication administration which include Right patient, Right medication, Right dose, Right route, Right time, and recently added Right documentation and Right for refusal. The five rights offer simple and practical guidance for nurses to use during drug preparation, delivery, and administration, and focus on individual performance (Adams, M., Holland, N., & Urban, C.2014). Even with these rights in place “medication errors remain one of the most common causes of unintended harm to patients. They contribute to adverse events that compromise patient safety and result in a large financial burden to the health service (Cloete, L.

Medication errors contribute to 7000 inpatient deaths in the United States per year (Bourbonnais, F., & Caswell, W. 2014). Since the nursing field is so highly integrated in medication administration, nurses ultimately play a significant role in patient safety related to medications. Medication errors not only cause patient death and family despair but they also have a large impact on the healthcare financial system that may include longer hospital stays, paying for additional medical costs and rehabilitations that may occur from the error and even medication cost. In 2008, medical errors cost the United States $19.5 billion and that Medication errors were estimated to account for more than 7,000 deaths annually (Hughes, R. G. n.d.). These high cost are in large due to such preventable errors and since medication administration is one of the highest risk task for a nurse to perform, regulations and policies such as implementation of the seven rights are placed in process to aid in preventing administration errors from occurring and providing high quality