You can use a supplied template for this assessment to conduct a root-cause analysis. The completed assessment will be a scholarly paper focusing on a quality or safety issue on medication administration in a healthcare setting of your choice and a safety improvement plan.

Improvement Plan with Evidence-Based and Best-Practice Strategies

The improvement plan for the healthcare setting under scrutiny will utilize educative and administrative approaches to implement the plan. The main goal of educative approaches is to expand nurses’ experience and knowledge of medication administration, while administrative approaches seek to address nursing fatigue and burnout. Educative programs will be administered through in-job training, which will be available weekly to all nurses. Aspects of practice that will form the bulk of these training sessions include communication skills for nurses, nursing collaborations in healthcare, medication handling, and interventions to minimize nurse-related medication errors (Mohammadipour et al., 2020). These pieces of training are expected to widen nurses’ understanding of their role in medication administration. The training is expected to achieve its goals within 7-10 weeks.

Administrative approaches will include staff rescheduling and the institution of participatory programs and support programs to help nurses cope with clinical difficulties. Staff rescheduling assigns nurses to their roles based on their experience and patient acuity. It minimizes fatigue and burnout by restricting the number of patients nurses handle (Groves et al., 2020). Supportive programs such as psychosocial interventions may ease nurses’ tension and provide the much-needed relaxation required for optimal cognitive functioning. Implementing these corrective measures may lower nurses’ burnout and optimize their care provision processes. This intervention is expected to achieve its goals in 1-3 months.

Existing Organizational Resources

Several existing organizational resources can be leveraged to minimize medication-related errors. These include educational resources on medication administration, such as literature, textbooks, drug leaflets, and online resources on medication handling. This may be used to expand nurses’ knowledge of medication handling administration. The mental health department is another valuable resource that can help nurses cope with clinical complexities and psychosocial challenges contributing to their fatigue and burnout. Leveraging these resources for nurses may help them prevent avoidable mistakes during medication handling.

Conclusion

Root cause analysis maintains significance in discovering root causes of care issues in healthcare and provides the groundwork for addressing them. As evident in the case above, root cause analysis informed evidence-based strategies to address improper dosing, such as staff training. These strategies can be integrated into an improvement plan to minimize medication errors. Organizational resources can be leveraged to complement the improvement plan and ensure it attains its target.

References

Aryankhesal, A., Mohammadibakhsh, R., Hamidi, Y., Alidoost, S., Behzadifar, M., Sohrabi, R., & Farhadi, Z. (2019). Interventions on reducing burnout in physicians and nurses: A systematic review. Medical Journal of The Islamic Republic of Iran. https://doi.org/10.47176/mjiri.33.77