Question

1. How wuold you respond to a medication error that did or did not cause harm to your patient?

2. As per CNO documentation standard what are the approperiate documentation required in reporting a medication error?

Answer 1

1.Responding to a medication Error

Medication error is any preventable error caused in the medication process which may or may not have caused harm to patient .Causes of medication errors are very wide it can be prescription error, indenting error, dispensing error, Adminstration error, documentation error,monitoring error .so once a medication error occurs the patient is the priority so review the patients conditions by assessment, inform to a medical practitioner,adminster any antidote or any treatment medication to be given to reverse the error or to minimize the effect of error in the patient .Once Patient is made comfortable and monitored inform the patient and family members about the error in a most gentle way you can .The communication to the family and patients about medication errors can prevent further lawsuits.Then immediately Report the medication error using your institutional incident reporting system.Do not try to play a blame game after the error just report the error using an incident report form .The incident report should have a detailed report of the incident like when,how,why,what ,who of the medication error .Once the reporting is done the quality team has to analyse the Root cause analysis of the medication error and devise a CAPA corrective and preventive action for the error so that the error is not repeated again and it will help us to know where is the gaps is it in the process or structure of medication Adminstration.

2.CNO documentation standards.

It has three standards .

a) communication:while filling a medication error form care should be observed whether all the demographic of the patient is entered correctly.it should include nursing assement,Planning,intervention,and evaluation of the patient done during medication adminstration.it should consist of subjective and objective data like the patients vitals before and after the error .The incident report should give a clear picture of the incident occurred including the patient education provided during Adminstration .The report should have the clear signature of the nurse with initials

b) Accountability:All medication error reporting should be complete ,accurate and timely filled .She should fill the form immediately after the error .Date and time of the error and reporting should be mentioned .The events should be filled in a chronological order,The incident report should be filled in a legible handwriting no overwriting or cancellations are allowed in case of any cancellations just put a cross across the word and rewrite it .Any late entry should be mentioned according to the institutional policy .The incident report should be filled and completed by one person .

c) Security:The last standard of documentation is confidentiality.

The nurse who filled the medication error form should submit it directly to the quality team .The form consist of patients health information so the nurse should safe guard the client information from getting leaked .The quality team should not discuss the incident report in public .Care should be kept to maintain the confidentiality of the patient and report .