Critical Appraisal of an Article on Medication Safety Practices

Running head: CRITICAL APPRAISAL 1
Critical Appraisal of an Article
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CRITICAL APPRAISAL 2
Critical Appraisal
Introduction
Nurses assume a crucial part during the time spent pharmaceutical administration. They
partake in recognizing issues identified with medicine management in clinical practices. Drug
mistakes are a typical factor influencing the health of patients. Keeping in mind the end goal to
eliminate pharmaceutical mistakes we consider interdisciplinary correspondence and
multidisciplinary approach. 33% of prescription mistakes emerge amid administration of drug.
At the point when the seven R's which incorporate, right time, right medication, right dose, right
documentation, right course, right patient, and right reason are not clung to, MAE's are probably
going to happen.
This paper is a critical appraisal of the article - Smeulers, M., Onderwater, A. T.,
Zwieten, M. C., & Vermeulen, H. (2014). Nurses' experiences and perspectives on medication
safety practices: an explorative qualitative study. Journal of nursing management, 22(3), 276-
285. This is a report of a qualitative field study with nurses. The study meant to explore the
experiences and perspectives of nurses on medication safety practices. It report explores deep
into the critical appraisal of the various aspects of the article and the methods used by the
authors.
The Research Problem and Its Significance
The study looked to explore the experiences that nurses have with the prevention of
medication administration errors and to have an understanding of their perspectives on the same.
The authors hypothesized that an insight into the experiences and perspectives of nurses on the
errors that occur during drug administration can help in tailoring and implementing safety
practices (Smeulers et al, 2014). Medication safety is an important emerging issue in healthcare.

CRITICAL APPRAISAL 3
Many patient get complications of disease as a result of medication errors (Berdot et al, 2012).
Medication errors can include over-dosage, under-dosage, administering the wrong medication,
giving medication to the wrong patients, inappropriate combination of medications, and
improper routes of administering medication (Bryman, 2017). Among the most important
complications of medication are prolonged hospital stay, increased rate of drug toxicities,
inadvertent physical injury, and death. Furthermore, nurses bear the primary responsibility of
drug administration hence their close involvement in this study (Irvine, Drew, & Sainsbury,
2013). Considering the magnitude of the issue at hand and its relevance to the nursing profession
and current practice, it is important to conduct studies and determine ways of preventing drug
administration errors. Prevention of such errors is an important part of improved patient care and
there is need to collect clinical evidence of the same.
Research Design and Methods
The researchers conducted a qualitative study. They were interested in understanding the
experiences and perspectives of nurses hence the suitability of a qualitative rather than a
quantitative study (Smeulers et al., 2014). Of the five qualitative study designs, the authors
utilized grounded theory. Grounded theory was the best design here since their study.
Considering the size and nature of the targeted participants, the researchers could not use a
phenomenology, a narrative or a case study (Lewis, 2015). Moreover, an ethnography was
inappropriate since the kind of data that the researchers were collecting was not anthropologic in
nature (Petty et al., 2012).
The researchers used snowball sampling to identify 20 participants of the study (Smuelers
et al., 2014). Snowball sampling is, however, a major weakness of the study. Snowball sampling,
like any other non-probability sampling method is subject to bias from the author (Palinkas et al.,