Pros And Cons Of Medication Errors

Many hospitals have systems of checks and balances to avoid errors, but what happens when the systems do not work? Today in the United States, medical errors are the fifth-leading cause of death. In 2000, the Institute of Medicine released a study, “To Err is Human”, revealing an estimated 98,000 deaths annually from medical errors. While this figure is assumed to be lower than the actual, each death comes with an inherent cost to the health care system. In today’s terms this figure is underestimated, however the accompanied cost is estimated to be between $17 billion and $29 billion annually. According to Grober and Bohnen (2005), “Medical error can be defined as, “an act of omission or commission in planning or execution that contributes

Nurses are expected to provide a competent level of care that is indicative of their education, experience, skill, and ability to act on agency policies or procedures. In a study of 1,116 hospitals Bond, Raehl, and Franke (2001) found, “Medication errors occurred in 5.07% of the patients admitted each year to these hospitals. Each hospital experienced a medication error every 22.7 hours (every 19.73 admissions). Medication errors that adversely affected patient care outcomes occurred in 0.25% of all patients admitted to these hospitals/year”(p. 4). This means at least one medication error occurs every 24 hours in those facilities studied, and these are preventable errors. The main responsibilities of nurses when administering medications are to prevent or catch error, and report such error. Even if the physician or prescribing health care professional has made a mistake in the order, it is the nurse’s job to question the

With medical errors increasing the length of stay and cost of care, hospitals are facing even smaller margins. Struggling to turn a profit they only way hospitals can grow is to improve the quality of care and reduce errors. It was not until recent legislation that hospitals were being reimbursed for poor quality of care leading to longer patient stays or further hospital-acquired infections. The recent health care reform legislation, the Patient Protection and Accountable Care Act, has stopped hospitals from receiving reimbursement for readmissions due to error or nosocomial infections. Not only does this act prevent reimbursement for poor quality care, but also hospitals that deliver lower standards of care will not be able to participate in the Medicare and Medicaid programs (Andel et al.,