For this assessment, you can use a supplied template to conduct a root-cause analysis. The completed assessment will be a scholarly paper focusing on a quality or safety issue pertaining to medication administration in a health care setting of your choice as well as a safety improvement plan.

Root-Cause Analysis and Safety Improvement Plan for Medication Administration

According to Schramme (2016), the central goal of medication is to achieve desired therapeutic outcomes that improve the patient’s wellness and quality of life. Health professionals also seek to provide medication and care therapies that achieve such therapeutic objectives with minimum harm to the patient (Rodziewicz et al., 2018). However, known or unknown errors are inherent in the treatment process, with risks associated with such errors during medications. Medication errors are the most commonly reported medical errors during the treatment process of patients in the facility. The majority of the reported medication errors occur during the administration phase. Such medication administration errors threaten patient safety within the care settings. Therefore, there is a need to understand the root causes of errors during medication administration and develop an evidence-based initiative to improve the safety of medication administration and prevent errors from recurring.

This paper presents a root cause analysis for medication administration in an in-patient care facility. The causes of such errors and the elements essential for improving medication administration safety are identified. The article also develops an evidence-based safety improvement plan for safe medication administration. The paper also analyzes the existing organizational resources and interventions that support a successful evidence-based strategy for improving safe medication administration. Hire our assignment writing services in case your assignment is devastating you. We offer assignment help with high professionalism.

Root-Cause Analysis and Safety Improvement Plan for Medication Administration

According to Wondmieneh et al. (2020), unsafe medication administration errors are the leading causes of preventable adverse health outcomes in patients, such as disability and death. They also affect health professionals and health organizations and can lead to forfeiture of practice licensing and criminal liability. Reducing and preventing medication errors is complicated, but it is necessary to improve patient safety (Tariq et al., 2021). It is important to carry out a root-cause analysis (RCA) to identify the causes of errors and elements essential to prevent such errors, improve patient safety, and reduce errors associated with medication administration. An RCA in healthcare is a problem-solving technique that aims to identify and understand the root causes of errors and other issues and how to fix them (Martin-Delgado et al., 2020).

The nurse manager identified 18 incidents of reported MAEs in the inpatient facility in the last six months. Considering the threat of medication administration errors on patient safety and the overall consequences of such errors to the clinicians and the facility, an RCA was conducted on the reported errors to identify their root causes. It was identified that all cases were reported by nurses who had administered medication to in-hospital patients. Ninety-two percent of the cases were directly caused by errors from the nurses’ side, while eight percent of the cases resulted from patient faults.

The RCA on causes of medication administration errors noted that 42 percent of the errors resulted from a lack of knowledge of drug information, including drug-to-drug interactions and drug action. In addition, 26 percent resulted from a lack of adequate communication with physicians, while 17 percent resulted from wrong medication calculations leading to wrong dosages. Eight percent of the reported cases were due to administering medications to the wrong patient. Three percent were linked to distraction and stress during the administration. Two percent were due to the patients moving during intravenous administration, leading to the errors, while 2 percent were due to administering the right medication using the wrong route.

Only eight percent of the reported errors resulted in patient harm while 92 percent did not cause any adverse drug outcomes; however, they have the capacity to compromise patient safety within the facility. Due to the clinical equation of errors to duty failure, the fear of associated punishment and legal action, and other associated consequences, a clinician may be reluctant to report errors (Rodziewicz et al., 2018). This means that the reported medication administration errors do not represent the actual number of errors occurring within the inpatient facility. The uncertainty of errors occurring getting reported creates a need to develop targeted, evidence-based initiatives to improve the safety and quality of medication processes and prevent medication administration errors.

According to the RCA, a majori