NHS FPX 4000 Assessment 4 Analyzing a Current Health Care Problem or Issue

NHS FPX 4000 Assessment 4 Analyzing a Current Health Care Problem or Issue

Furthermore, research suggests medication errors occur while nurses deal with burnout and fatigue. Healthcare institutions are constantly dealing with nursing shortages, especially after a global pandemic, which is requiring nurses to work mandatory overtime shifts. Part of the problem lies within these healthcare institutions dismissing unhealthy working conditions. Shortages lead to unsafe patient ratios, which may lead nurses to feel overwhelmed and a sense of impending doom. There are reasons why healthcare workers are often referred to as a “team” because everyone should be responsible for pulling their weight. This includes managers to ensure proper staffing for what it is most important in our field of work, patient safety. Researchers discovered that nearly 20% of registered nurses working in hospitals, experience overload, find themselves working extra hours, with unsatisfactory staffing. (Alrabadi et al., 2021). Creating dangerous work environments for both patients and staff is something that should be evaluated if the goal remains to have successful patient outcomes.

Analysis

As a new graduate nurse working in Labor and Delivery, I am required to administer routine medications to laboring mothers. Because this is a specialized unit, and I am a new nurse, my hospital requires I have at least fourteen weeks of orientation to the unit, and classes every month to further educate me in the specialty and being a nurse in general. There have been classes where “near-misses” with medications have been discussed and debriefed. The reason I am bringing up this information is because I am sure my hospital is not the only facility who participates in these practices. That being said, medication errors do happen. It is essential to partake in safe practices all of the time no matter how much experience one may have. Triple-checking my medications before passing them has become a staple in my routine, and though it may take me a few minutes longer to complete the medication pass, I am ensuring safety with my patients and protecting my license as a nurse. 

The context for Patient Safety Issues

As mentioned in the previous assignment, nursing has been America’s most trusted profession for twenty years straight. With that, comes a huge responsibility to take care of our patients and keep them safe. With very real and current problems in our healthcare system such as short staffing of nurses and knowledge-based medication errors, safety is being compromised to new extremes. The writing is on the wall and is supported by evidence in research. As medicine in our country advances, the way medications are administered is also changing, perhaps leading to patient safety issues. In a recent quantitative study, Author Justinia (2021) discovered the number of “overrides” for medications totaled to 1087 overrides. 738 were done so inappropriately. From there, 283 inappropriate overrides, and 92 appropriate overrides were sampled, and the medication errors resulted to be 7 to 0 respectively. (Justinia et al., 2021). Most devices used to pull medications have been set up to pull medications in a safe and systematic way however a feature such as the “override” immediately unlocks a recipe for potential disaster as there probably is a reason why the machine did not allow the individual to pull the medication in the first place. Our healthcare institutions should inclusively use evidence-based research in applying safety measures with medication administration, as some factors that create errors are simply inexcusable.