Nursing Staffing Levels and Medication Errors Due to Nursing Workarounds

This is an amazing post. You have shared your personal experience related to a workaround you have witnessed in your nursing career. Your focus on nursing staffing levels and medication errors is a brilliant way of explaining workarounds in nursing and highlighting the actual impacts of workarounds in nursing practice. Agreeably, most errors in nursing are mostly related to the nurse-to-patient ratios. One nurse serving several patients risks burnout and the occurrence of errors during the medication process. Notably, technological advances and the adoption of healthcare technologies such as electronic medication prescribing and dispensing have greatly improved the efficiency of nursing care delivery and significantly reduced the occurrence of medication errors and related harm (Roumeliotis et al., 2019). However, due to the efficiency these technologies promise, nurses tend to be assigned multiple patients. The need to meet the demands of each patient assigned to a nurse can be the major cause of them engaging in these workarounds in care delivery. As you have argued, these workarounds can be very dangerous and harmful to patients. In fact, evidence shows that despite using technologies such as bar-code-assisted medication administration in hospital settings, workarounds were a risk factor for medication errors during the medication administration process (Van Der Veen et al., 2018). From a personal perspective, although workarounds pose a risk of errors in nursing, they can sometimes be driven by good intentions and necessity, for instance, when a patient demands emergency care or when multiple patients need attention while the staffing is low. Nonetheless, regardless of whether driven by necessity, nurses must ensure that the care provided is safe and directed towards meeting individual patient care needs.

References

Roumeliotis, N., Sniderman, J., Adams-Webber, T., Addo, N., Anand, V., Rochon, P., Taddio, A., & Parshuram, C. (2019). Effect of Electronic Prescribing Strategies on Medication Error and Harm in Hospital: a Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 34(10), 2210. https://doi.org/10.1007/S11606-019-05236-8