Approaches to Medication: Back to Basic and Do not Interrupt

Running Head: APPROACHES TO MEDICATION
1
‘Back to Basic’ and ‘Do not Interrupt’ Approaches to Medication
Name:
Institution:

‘Back to Basic’ and ‘Do not Interrupt’ Approaches to Medication 2
Introduction
A medication error is a preventable event which may occur because of inappropriate use of
medication while the medication is under the healthcare professional control. According to Blank
(2011), the medication error is the commonly reported error in the emergency department with
most of the mistakes happening during the administration phase. The purpose of this study is to
identify practices that may improve and reduce the dosage administration errors that occur and
may lead to adverse effects on the patient (Flynn, 2012). The study took three months where
75% out of the 127 nurses participated in the research, and the method that got used in the study
was educational intervention. On the other hand, the ‘Do not Interrupt’ approach to medication
refers to the interrupts that occur when nurses are administrating medication. The study took
eight weeks where 227 nurses participated in the study, and they administered 4781 medications.
Therefore, the ‘Back to Basic’ and ‘Do not Interrupt’ approaches to medication are directly
related because when interruption of the nurse occurs when she is administering medicine, this
may lead to a medication error.
Methods
1. Back to Basic Approach of Medication
a)
Pre-test Scores
High
Low
b)
Post-test Scores
High
Low

‘Back to Basic’ and ‘Do not Interrupt’ Approaches to Medication 3
c)
Voluntarily reported medication
errors
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1
1.2
1.4
Before Survey
After Survey
The purpose of the ‘Back to Basic’ approach study is to reduce the medication administration
errors that occur often in the emergency department. Medication errors can get classified into
different categories which include action-based slips, knowledge-based mistakes and memory
based lapses. On this study, the ‘Back to Basics' study involved an examination of 95 nurses
based on their knowledge on medication administration procedures, the reflection of their
behaviors towards recommended medication practices and their medication administration
errors. The study was conducted in three months by assessment through tests, surveys and
observations on the nurses' chart reviews and voluntary error reports (Blank, 2011). In the ‘Back
to Basics’ approach to medication, the pre-test conducted reported that 69% of the nurses
achieved perfect scores while 91% achieved perfect scores in the post-test. In the post-survey,
the clinicians in their specific proportions said they followed the recommended practice most of
the time which increased in 8 of the ten survey questions. The results, however, showed that
there was no significant change from the survey conducted (Blank, 2011). Moreover, the review
of charts revealed little difference in total medication errors (25% and 24% respectively). It,
therefore, means that the nurses scored 299 during the pre-test and 295 during the post-test.
During the voluntarily reported medication errors dropped from 1.28 to 0.99 per 1000 patients
(blank, 2011).