Question

Write a qualitative research critique regarding improving medication administration and decreasing medication errors. Find a qualitative article about medication errors and answer the following questions:

What was the problem that the authors were trying to answer? What were the research questions?

What type of research design was used?

Describe the population studied. What were the characteristics of that population (age, gender, etc.)?

How were the research subjects chosen for the study? What type of sampling was used?

How was the data collected?  How was the data analyzed?

Summarize the significant findings in your own words.

What is your overall evaluation of the readability of this article? Was it easy to understand and follow? If not, what did you have trouble with?

Do you think the data found in this article can help to improve nursing practice? Why or why not?

Answer 1

Article :Study of Medication Error in Hospitalised Patients in Tertiary Care Hospital

Authors : Sandip Patel, Ashita Patel, Varsha Patel and Nilay Solanki

Indian Journal of Pharmacy Practice, Vol 11, Issue 1, Jan-Mar, 2018

Research problem and question .

In this article,the authors try to address a major problem in the health industry -medication errors ,that is happening since eons. Medication errors can take place at any step from prescribing to the administration of the drug. In USA ,7000 deaths have been reported in hospitals per year due to medication error. The authors also aim at conducting a detailed study about medication errors and to find reconciliation methods to sort out the problem.A complete solution to this problem could not be framed .They also wanted to assess the actual impact of drug interaction.The article successfully shows the percentage of medication error occurrence and the type of medication error that prevailed most commonly .

Research Design

The research design was mainly a correlational approach. A correlational research design involves measuring different variables to see whether there is a predictable relation among the variables .

Correlation of age versus errors, number of medications versus errors, length of stay versus errors were mainly analysed for this study.It is a prospective observational study .

Population under study

A prospective observational study was carried out for a period of 8 months from 15th June 2016 to 15th February 2017 in hospitalized patients (both males and females) of Jivraj Mehta Smarak and Health foundation, Ahmedabad.

Mean age of the patients included in the study was 49.21 ±18.13 years and 49.22 ± 18.18 years in medicine ward and surgery ward, respectively

Selection of research subjects and sampling method

In patients in the general medicine department and surgical department,regardless of the gender, age and diseases were included in the study. All outpatients, patients in the medical ICU, inpatients without medication therapy, pregnant women and psychiatric patients were excluded from the study.

Stratified sampling method is used for this study to find out the majority of medication errors in different categories such as males or females,medical or surgical department etc .