Introduction
There are a lot of occupational safety risks that are involved in medical administration. These are brought about by risk factors that diminish the quality of the baccalaureate nurse and their efforts in providing quality health services. These factors are sometimes general to all patients and can sometimes be patient-specific. Managing these risks requires one to follow professional guidelines to maintain the quality assurance of health and maintain the integrity of organizations included in healthcare provision. In these instances, the nurse’s role is usually exclusive and essential in examining the policies to achieve drug administration safety. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the role of nurses in medical administration safety.
Specific Patient Safety Risk
The patient safety risk usually involves factors that can always be avoided by the patient or nurses, provided they work together. The risks are generally more inclined to when a specific patient diagnosis leads to poor or failed medical administration. In some cases, safety risks usually involve the appearance of actions such as wearing off an anesthetic prescription during surgery, providing an incorrect dosage of drugs, or poor concentration of body fluids (Heczková & Bulava, 2018). These may be specific to patients when factors such as patient emergencies occur, and a quick response is required, which may in most cases lead to making immediate and drastic decisions which may lead to poor medical administration.
Misdiagnosis as a result of failed communication between patients and nurses can lead to wrong medical administration due to patients’ lack of confidence and withholding of important information required for proper diagnosis. Another factor that can lead to this patient-specific risk is a delay in seeking out medical intervention. Such a delay is a significant cause of poor medical administration due to a lack of proper patient probing about the severity of patients’ condition and their quality of life. All these factors are usually patient-specific and determine the quality of medical administration offered by nurses.
Solutions to Problems Facing Medical Administration
Many healthcare stakeholders have therefore taken to the responsibility of finding solutions to medical administration problems that include solutions like healthcare benchmarking for nurses. This has proved to be very productive as results have shown that when nurses interact and share their hacks in medical administration, improvement is expected in many areas. Such a solution has been viewed as a comprehensive solution to fixing the medical administration problem (Jonson et al., 2017). Most nurses reevaluated their medical administration systems to include policies that govern and state how they administer the drugs in their line of work.
Benchmarking was keen to focus on the demographics of patients and most of the cases present in the medical rooms that could present themselves as risk factors for poor drug administration. The benchmarking was also a way of improving nurses’ confidence in drug administration and jolt and exercising their knowledge on drug administration. Therefore, it is essential to observe that a practitioner exchange program on drug administration should be established to improve and reinforce drug administration.
Another robust solution that could solve the drug administration policy problem was the increase of facilities and systems used in healthcare institutions, including increased qualified practitioners, bed space and capacity, and a well-funded insurance policy for patients. This could reduce the workload and pressure on nurses that would increase the risk of poor drug administration (Rohde & Domm, 2018). An increase of well-trained practitioners would lower the risk of patients being given poor medical administration. A flawed health system as a whole is a contributor and a risk factor to poor medical administration. Therefore, more focus must be given to healthcare, and more funding should be given to help with medication administration.
Stakeholders in Healthcare
Stakeholders in healthcare play an essential role in how healthcare is delivered. These stakeholders include the government, companies dealing in pharmaceutical products, insurance, facility employees, and patients and doctors. These stakeholders determine how healthcare is delivered through different roles. It is, therefore, best fit that nurses work together with these stakeholders to ensure maximum results (Hammoudi et al., 2018). Therefore, nurses need first to learn the roles of these stakeholders as this will increase their knowledge on how to work with these stakeholders for proper medication administration.
Nurses should provide the stakeholders with confidence that medical administration is at the forefront. Nurses should as well give feedback on how each stakeholder is progressing concerning the administration. This can include telling pharmacists how a drug is being perceived and places to improve, such as reaching out to patients and coordinating with insurance companies. Implementation of such guidelines has proved to be solutions that have saved many healthcare facilities. Nurses can, in turn, help the medical administration by aiding in reducing costs in healthcare by following the five rights rule that ensures optimum medical administration while maintaining patient safety (Heczková & Bulava, 2018). These five rights include providing correct patient demographics, putting in place computer systems that auto-identify patients, probing patients, checking listing patient vitals and prescriptions, and ensuring patient safety during their stay in healthcare facilities.
Conclusion
It is, therefore, important that nurses be aware of their roles in patient safety and their duty in convincing the stakeholders of their role in the same. Nurses must therefore be able to convince the stakeholders to uphold their responsibility in achieving this. It is, therefore, important that the healthcare system acknowledge that to provide patient safety, more funding is needed to finance the training of nurses and the equipping of technological devices to provide excellent medical administration.
References
Hammoudi, B. M., Ismaile, S., & Abu Yahya, O. (2018). Factors associated with medication administration errors and why nurses fail to report them. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences, 32(3), 1038-1046. Web.
Heczková, J., & Bulava, A. (2018). Nurses’ knowledge of the medication management at intensive care units. Pielegniarstwo XXI Wieku/Nursing in the 21st Century, 17(1), 18-23. Web.
Jonson, C. O., Pettersson, J., Rybing, J., Nilsson, H., & Prytz, E. (2017). Short simulation exercises to improve emergency department nurses’ self-efficacy for initial disaster management: Controlled before and after study. Nurse Education Today, 55, 20-25. Web.
Rohde, E., & Domm, E. (2018). Nurses’ clinical reasoning practices that support safe medication administration: An integrative review of the literature. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 27(3-4), 402-411. Web.