Medication Errors: Categories, Reasons, and Prevention Strategies

LAW AND ETHICS 1
Law and Ethics
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LAW AND ETHICS 2
What is a medication error, and how are these errors categorized?
The failure in the treatment procedure that results in harm to the particular patient is the
medication error. The medication errors are many, and each is categorized based on the nature of
the particular error (Roughead, Semple & Rosenfeld, 2016). Thus the critical examples of
medication errors include, wrong time, prescribing, dose , omission error, drug preparation error,
and dosage form, among others. However, the broad categories of medication errors include
knowledge-based errors, memory based errors, action-based errors, and rule-based errors.
Describe the various reasons errors occur.
According to Nanji et al. (2016), medication errors occur as a result of varying reasons.
The significant reasons for the medication errors include;
 Medical abbreviations
 Poor communication with the doctors
 Medications that look alike as well as names of drugs that sound alike.
 Lack of proper communication between a particular individual and his or her doctor
Apart from the above mentioned aspects that result in medication errors, there are also other
factors, and they are classified into a variety of categories as indicated below;
Factors Associated with Patients
 Complex clinical case
 Characteristics of the patients, such as language barriers, literacy, and personality.
Health Care Professionals Factors
 Insufficient knowledge of the patient
 Lack of communication between a health care professional as well as with patients
 Insufficient therapeutic training