Common Medication Mistakes, Guidelines and Care Leadership

Question

Article 1

What are the most common medication errors at your current location?

What policy does your organization have regarding medication errors? Describe the mechanism of its implementation.

What recommendations can you provide for improvement?

Answer

In an article by Pamela Treister, the author focuses on maintaining knowledge about drug administration. This article focused on aspects of nursing leadership among nursing students at a private college in suburban New York. While this paper contributes significantly to its leadership in drug delivery and knowledge retention, it ignores other aspects that measure the effectiveness of knowledge in drug delivery to patients. At the time this project was implemented, these students were in their final semester of nursing school. Certain changes have been made to the curriculum to help these students. In addition to leadership mediation, a quality improvement project was initiated. The project found that changing two specific learning strategies for her in the spring semester of third grade improved her knowledge retention in the fall semester of fourth grade. The main benefits discussed in this article are the use of technology and its challenges. Several changes occurred during the nursing program with the support of nursing leaders.

Analyzing this article from the style of the response, it can be said that leadership was being nurtured. A nursing leadership style has been adopted, but it is not an effective style when it comes to leading organizations to change. While the paper carefully recognizes key factors in adapting to change, such as curriculum changes and the use of technology, it fails to fully explore the key point of the paper, namely the role of leadership. An innovative leadership style could have made a significant shift in the perspective of drug delivery and quality improvisation.

In this study, we investigated the modalities of drug administration in the final semester of nursing school. This drug delivery method is basic but very important and relevant for subsequent learning in nursing practice. If knowledge retention can be improved through nursing leadership, overall drug delivery and overall safety in drug use can be improved.

One of the most common medication errors in the current field of work is giving the patient the wrong medication. This type of error is mostly caused by similar drug names. Prescribing the wrong dose of medicine is also a mistake that can result in a nurse giving too little or too much medicine. This can lead to patients being denied treatment for certain medical conditions or overdosing. Ignoring a patient’s medical history triggers another type of medication error-induced allergic reaction. Provide medicines that cannot be used together when nurses may administer medicines at the wrong time. If the mediation is done improperly, it has to be arranged in a certain way, and the patient can be harmed if the pharmacist mixes the medicine wrong.

Article 2

Organizations have put in place various policies related to medication errors and how to avoid them. This policy documents administration of medication and notification to supervisors. Medication errors can be reduced or avoided when organization-specific policies are adopted through the recording of all medications administered to all patients. The mechanism for enforcing the policy is to record all medications administered and report them to the administrator. The supervisor will perform error checking and take necessary action if an error is detected.

A paper by Chenjuan, Jingjing, and Marjorie reveals the impact of ward collaboration and nursing leadership on nursing quality and nursing outcomes. Healthcare has undergone a major transformation in recent years, and the contributions of nurses and caregivers continue to be highlighted. This paper focuses on the importance of collaboration between nursing leaders and the workforce, but completely ignores the leadership styles employed. This reflects the limits of quality of care and outcomes. The study collected data from 9,742 nurses in her 1,228 units at 200 acute care hospitals in 41 states. A multi-level linear regression method was subsequently used for data analysis. Coordination between nurses, nurses, and nurses was measured. Details of such cooperation were not provided in this study, ignoring other factors involved in providing patient care. Findings related to job satisfaction, nurse-reported quality of care, and retirement intentions. Findings show that nurses with strong nursing leadership have lower retirement intentions, higher job satisfaction, and better quality of care on the ward. This study therefore reflects that a care environment with strong collaboration between nursing leaders and the workforce can ultimately lead to quality care.

This article identifies numerous barriers to effective collaboration between nursing leaders and the workforce. The identified obstacle is lack of coordination. Nursing leaders are expected to work collaboratively with employees, but their responsibilities are not perfectly aligned. Additionally, this article does not identify workload as a major impediment to effective collaboration or shifts. Care leaders may only work a few shifts, but may prove impossible to work with a diverse workforce all the time.

The leadership behaviors of nursing staff shown here correspond to leadership styles in nursing. Although it is a well-accepted style in the current healthcare system, organizations should adopt a transformative leadership style. Transformative leadership behaviors of nurses are effective in this area where healthcare organizations are rapidly transforming.

Article 3

The results of this study showed that collaboration between nursing leaders and nursing staff resulted in a range of positive outcomes. These results were associated with reduced intention to leave the ward, improved quality of care on the ward, and increased job satisfaction. However, the study also did not consider other factors that may have led to higher job satisfaction and lower retirement intentions.

My current areas of responsibility include: lack of training in interprofessional collaboration; ambiguity in roles and leadership; lack of clearly articulated, measurable and shared goals; is a barrier to doing so. Coordination among nurses may be compromised. These are some of the visible barriers that lead to poor collaboration among nurses within an organization. A recommendation to improve or reduce barriers in nursing collaboration is the provision of interprofessional training. Targeted interprofessional training and routine communication help remove barriers to nursing collaboration. Better defined roles for nursing collaboration can increase effectiveness between nursing leaders and staff.

In this article, Castillo and James discuss how community leaders can become effective leaders. Performance is the most important aspect of clinical leadership and is directly related to hospital service. Ward managers represent the largest administrative group in the NHS and contribute to sustainable performance. A program was developed to help these employees become effective leaders. The scope of this article assumes that large-scale development cannot be achieved in a top-down program and must be done on the front line. When employees are trained in different areas at the same time, they work better together. Overall, the program addressed the need to develop frontline leaders so they can perform better in the future. The head nurse’s values, attitudes and behavior were found to be rigid and reluctant to effect change. The head nurse worked with management to define leadership roles. They were unwilling to take on managerial roles or additional responsibilities that could add stress to their overall job role. In this document, the station manager’s values, attitudes and behaviors are considered important in their overall contribution to performance and results.

Based on experience and observation, her ability to assume leadership roles is one of her hallmarks of a good and effective head nurse. Ability to assume additional roles and responsibilities on the station that can effectively contribute to performance. The effective performance of the head nurse is very important and vital to the effectiveness of any particular station. The identified characteristics can therefore improve the overall effectiveness and effectiveness of the organization.

Reference

Castillo, C., & James, S. (2013). How to turn ward managers into leaders. Nursing times, 109(9), 18-19.

Ma, C., Shang, J., & Bott, M. J. (2015). Linking unit collaboration and nursing leadership to nurse outcomes and quality of care. JONA: The Journal of Nursing Administration, 45(9), 435-442. DOI: 10.1097/NNA.0000000000000229

Treister, P. (2017). Leadership, Medication Administration, and Knowledge Retention: A Quality Improvement Project. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 26(1), 89-99.