Critical Appraisal Case Study 2022

Running head: CRITICAL APPRAISAL
CRITICAL APPRAISAL
Name of Student
Name of University
Author note

CRITICAL APPRAISAL1
Keers (2018) aims to study ‘What causes medication administration errors in a mental health
hospital? A qualitative study with nursing staff’. The aim of the study of the study is to
understand Medication administration errors as a major risk in mental healthcare to patient
and the aim of the research is to feel the gap left by the deficiency of detailed studies
performed to comprehend the underlying causations of medical administration errors that
limit the level of delivered patient centred care. The study focusses to answer the research
questions such as – 1. How does experience differences influence medication administration
errors? 2. How does staff mix affect the way of medication administration error? 3. How does
guidelines affect and influence the overall cause and effect of medication administration
error? This research study scrutinizes the effect of MAEs on admitted psychological patients
within a mental health facility supported by National Health Service in North West England.
In the methodology, the study takes in both student and mental healthcare professional nurses
experienced in psychiatric units and sample was collected by a combined effort of incident
reports plus advertisements where these subjects was invited then to participate for semi-
structured interviews (McIntosh & Morse, 2015) where they were asked their experiences
with MAE. The study does use the right qualitative method that incorporates usage of open
ended questions that help the participants elucidate and expand on their reflections without
any boundaries and the research method is appropriate to the purpose of the research and
adheres to the research questions, appropriately. The study finds out that a total twenty
participants revealed twenty six incidents of MAEs (and about five close misses) in these
semi structured interviews (Kallio et al., 2016). The study categorized these errors as in ‘slips
and lapses’ (as in 16 cases) and 5 were mistakes. The reasons identified by the study were
found to be disruptive and provoking circumstances that relate to patient, senior nurses, the
criticality of the disease, the medication administration task itself (Rausch, Seifried &
Harteis, 2017), negative cooperation, knowledge gap and sociological disruption. Some of

CRITICAL APPRAISAL2
these local conditions had origins in wider organisational latent failures. The emergent
themes included improper staffing levels, imbalance in the skilled staff, sociological and
environmental distractions, complexities related to number of medications to be administered
to a single patient and communication problems. To our knowledge this is the first published
in-depth qualitative study to investigate the underlying causes of specific MAEs in a mental
health hospital. Non adherence to clinical guidelines and best practice guidelines are other
associated issues, as identified by the study. The strength of the research study is that it finds
out an overall and detail account of various subjective perspectives that lead to this severe
adverse clinical problem. The weakness of the study is that it uses only the qualitative points
to raise the discussion and it could have use certain amount of quantitative studies to support
the findings. The study uses comparatively newer literature that is in the time span of last 5
years and the evidences are validated with the modern era.