NURS 3402 Evidence Based Nursing Research

Various factors are there that cause medication error and they are:

Team factor- Team factor is one of the greatest factors that creates medication error and affects patients’ safety and their lives. Several kinds of reasons are there behind this type of factor. Due to inaccessibility of clinical information of the patients, doctors and nurses find it difficult to treat the patient properly and medication error can occur as a result. Sometimes layouts of charts and records that provide the information regarding patients’ health status cannot be easily readable or understandable which might create issue in the medication procedure and create medication error. Apart from that, the resources and reference guidelines that support medication process by providing background information and data related to patients’ health are not available. If labelling and packaging of any medicine is not properly done then also medication error can occur. Even, lack of coordination between the healthcare professionals, system failures while prescribing also causes error (Department of Health Therapeutic Goods Administration 2013). Due to all these reason, patients may become the victim of medication error and it harms their safety and even sometimes it can endanger their lives too.   

Patient factor- Among various factors, the contribution of patient factor in creating medication error cannot be negligible. The factor impacts safety of the patients. Sometimes, nurses and doctors are less familiar with the condition of the patients’ health. Due to this, they do not get support from the patients’ medical history and creates error in the treatment process. If communication with the patient is not possible then it becomes difficult for the doctors and the nurses to assess and analyze patients’ condition properly. So, this communication gap is considered as one of the greatest reasons of medication error. Again, in some cases from medical history it can be easily found that nurses and doctors are not having enough knowledge about the health issue of the patient and due to this kind of acuity of the problem diagnosis result can produce wrong data which in turn can create medication error and affect the safety and health of the patients (Nanji et al. 2016).