Article Review

Citation

Gorgich, E. A. C., Barfroshan, S., Ghoreishi, G., &Yaghoobi, M. (2016). Investigating the causes of medication errors and strategies to prevention of them from nurses and nursing student viewpoint. Global journal of health science, 8(8), 220.

The Aim of the Study

The purpose of this study was to investigate the causes of medical errors and prevention strategies from a nursing practitioner and nursing student viewpoint.

Research Problem

This article argues that medication errors have become a significant problem across the globe According to this article, the changing lifestyle across the world has led to an increase in diseases such as diabetes, obesity, cancers, cardiovascular illnesses, as well as additions necessitating constant intake of drugs thus contributing to more medical mistakes

Research Sample

This was a cross-sectional descriptive study whose sampling was done in 2015. It was conducted on 62 intern nursing students in nursing, 327 nursing staff members in khatam-al-anbia hospital and midwifery school of Zahedan, Iran.

Research Methodology

The methodology used to collect data was the use of a valid and reliable questionnaire. To analyze the data, descriptive statistics, T-test and ANOVA were applied by use of SPSS16 software.

The Findings of the Study

This article found that the tiredness and overload cause 97.8% of the medical errors among nurses while the nursing students found that 77.4% of the errors were caused by drug calculation. The most effective prevention strategy was reducing the workload among nurses and increasing the number of nurses in various hospitals.

Recommendation

This paper recommends that nurse-managers should resolve the human resources problem. The nurse-patient ratio in most States is not established which forces nurses to attend to more patients that they should in a day. More so, nurses are forced to take more overtime shifts thus working more than the legal working plus overtime hours. This leaves the nurses extremely exhausted making them prone to errors. More so, the HR should provide workshops and in-service education regarding the preparation of medications, side-effects of drugs and pharmacological knowledge.

Thoughts and Feeling

The primary purpose of nursing care is to ensure patient safety. Providing the wrong medication for a particular disease, using the wrong dosage, administering the wrong strength of medicine or missing to administer the medicine to the patients jeopardizes patient safety. I agree that the leading cause of medical errors is that nurses are overworked in hospitals especially in the United States. The government should consider adding more colleges to train more nurses.

Reference

Gorgich, E. A. C., Barfroshan, S., Ghoreishi, G., &Yaghoobi, M. (2016). Investigating the causes of medication errors and strategies to prevention of them from nurses and nursing student viewpoint. Global journal of health science, 8(8), 220.