Reasons That the Chosen Information Helps to Explain a Health Care Issue

The type of scholarly information chosen is quite useful in explaining the issues of medication errors by sharing knowledge-based information on the possible causes of medication errors and the consequences that patients are likely to face. For example, communication failures investigations explain that general problems, including ambiguous directions and low e-health record interoperability, foster settings vulnerable to medical adverse events. Additionally, research on providers’ fatigue and time constraints provide an appreciation of the people factor in the errors, emphasizing the importance of systems solutions such as decreasing the providers’ working hours or increasing the use of technology to cut on the physical human interventions. The analysis of the errors during passing over the patients shows that there is a high level of the medication reconciliation problem to identify the best solutions for healthcare organizations. This is especially evident by choosing this form of scholarly information which shows that medication errors are complex and often span from human, technological as well as procedural approaches that need to be enhanced to impact the total patient safety and outcome.

Medication errors include wrong dozes, wrong medications, wrong routes of administration, wrong times, wrong preparation and wrong patients given a medication. It therefore covers a vast array of mistakes such as wrong strength, wrong drug, no observation of a patient’s reaction to a drug, and medication transcription errors (Tsegaye et al., 2020). These are mistakes that can take place at some stage of medication process and they are most of the time system errors, human errors or communication errors between the healthcare providers.

Medication errors are reported to be one of the most common causes of injury and preventable harm in healthcare facilities on the global level which makes this issue a significant sphere of public health.

Medication errors involve various people that include the healthcare providers which comprises of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and even the patients themselves (Dionisi et al., 2021). Physicians may injure patients by administering wrong dosages or by not checking on the possibility of the react of the drug the patient is already taking with the new drug or treatment required; pharmacists may misunderstand physicians’ prescription or give out wrong drugs. Nurses are the primary representatives of care providers in USA and are in direct contact with patients and while giving out medicines and this may lead to the wrong medicine or wrong dose being given due to overwhelming pressures or miscommunication. Patients are also involved since they may not understand or follow dosing instructions correctly this may result into a medication error. Sources of these errors can be attributed to individual and structural factors resulting in their occurrence. This pressure is compounded by such factors as excessive patient workload, in the form of medication management, inadequate education on medication/drug interactions, cross-team communication breakdown, lack of integration of technology, and information verification and medication orders inadequacies. There emerge specific causes of these errors, and only when these causes are realized, can measures be put in place which would reduce the occurrence of such mistakes and therefore benefit the patients.

Medication errors can only be solved by employing various strategies that deal with human factors that cause the error in addition to the system. Two major strategies include enhanced professional education of healthcare providers regarding inter- drug interactions, dosing,

medication reconciliation, and nursing considerations during the transfer of patient care. The failure that arises from the lack of such knowledge can be eliminated by adopting better training practices that focus on such aspects. Also improving interprofessional communication using universal structures and probably avoiding the use of ambiguous language in a reasonably present order. Other technological advancement like e-prescribing, bar code, uses when administering drugs and CDSS has been found to reduce the errors as many processes are done through technology (Küng et al., 2021). These systems can alert the possibility of possible drug-drug interaction or alert the providers of incorrect dosages hence providing an added layer of safety. Another measures that are needed for improving the medication safety include the creation of the safety culture, which implies that employees should report adverse events willingly without any consequences.

The failure to manage medication errors poses a risk of severe outcomes in relation to the patient and the whole system. Failure to address the problem raises the danger of patient harm because mistakes with m