Write a 4-6 page analysis of a current problem or issue in health care, including a proposed solution and possible ethical implications. Describe the healthcare problem or issue you selected for use in Assessment 2 and provide details about it. Analyzing a Current Health Care Issue-Medication Errors Analyzing a Current Health Care Issue-Medication Errors Explore your chosen topic. For this, you should use the first four steps of the Socratic Problem-Solving approach to aid your critical thinking. This approach was introduced in Assessment 2. Identify possible causes for the problem or issue.

Analyzing a Current Health Care Issue-Medication Errors

The previous assessment identified and presented medication errors as a persistent but preventable healthcare issue that significantly impacts patient safety. As such, this paper develops on the previous assessment and aims to identify the elements of medication errors, including causes and contributing factors, and analyze medication errors, including the setting or context for medications, their significance in nursing practice, and the groups of people affected by medication errors. The paper also discusses the potential solutions for medication errors and selects one solution for implementation, as well as the ethical principles (beneficence, nonmaleficence, autonomy, and justice) to be considered if the potential solution is implemented.

Elements of the Issue

Medication errors are a serious and preventable problem in healthcare that significantly presents a risk to patient safety. Medication errors have the potential to occur at any stage of the medication process. This means that the risk of such errors occurring is high during the point of prescription or during the administration of the medications. The common types of medication errors in nursing include wrong rate of administration, wrong time, wrong dosage, wrong route, wrong drug type, wrong patient, and drug omissions (Alrabadi et al., 2021).

Medication errors are an issue of concern in healthcare, especially nursing care, for several reasons. For instance, medication errors are related to the development of preventable adverse drug effects (ADEs) (Alghamdi et al., 2019), increased length of stay, patient harm and disability, exacerbation of illnesses, and even patient death. Medication errors are therefore focused on due to their negative impact on the quality and safety of care patients receive, the reputation of facility and care providers, and the unintentional increase in healthcare costs.

Various factors potentially contribute to the occurrence of medication errors in nursing. In all cases, medication errors occur due to human errors. Regardless of their experience in delivering healthcare services, including medical care, healthcare professionals like nurses and physicians are prone to make mistakes while writing down medications, misreading prescriptions, calculating dosages, and quoting medications with similar names. Various factors, such as increased workload and work pressure (leading to burnout) and lack of experience, contribute to these mistakes, leading to medication errors. A study by Wondmieneh et al. (2020)  found that a majority of medication errors among nurses occurring at the point of administration were linked to a lack of adequate training, lack of clear medication administration guidelines, the nurses’ inadequate experience in medication administration, and patients interrupting the nurses during medication administration. Other contributing factors include poor communication in terms of both verbal and non-verbal, lack of sufficient tech, and cases of complex polypharmacy.

Analysis

As a nurse, it is important to be able to understand medication errors in terms of what they actually are, the settings or context in which they may occur, their significance in nursing practice, and the groups of people affected by or prone to medication errors. In simple terms, medication errors are the resulting events following the mistakes healthcare providers make during the prescription, dispensation, and administration of medications that can potentially harm the patient physically and psychologically.

Setting or Context for Medication Errors

Medication errors can occur in all healthcare settings where pharmacotherapeutic approaches are employed to manage conditions or diseases. This means they may occur in inpatient and outpatient settings and at home. The most common settings are hospital and inpatient settings. Medication errors occur mostly in hospital and inpatient settings due to the high number of people visiting the hospitals and the risk of confusion and pressure from dealing with different types of patients, conditions, and medications. Another common setting where medications occur is in long-term care facilities. Long-term care facilities such as nursing homes and other assisted care settings majorly deal with elderly patients with multiple and complex conditions requiring complex treatment regimens. In elderly care settings, polypharmacy is highly associated with the risk of errors occurring during medication and patients experiencing adverse health outcomes (AL-Musawe et al., 2019). Other settings where medication errors can occur include homecare settings. The risks of medication errors within homecare settings are higher as patients manage the medication administration processes themselv