Relevant research is being conducted worldwide every day that can be of assistance to healthcare professionals in Australia. Our clinical staff will provide a small précis of some of the research with links that take you to the relevant websites for the full papers.
Medication safety in acute care in Australia: where are we now?
Part 1: a review of the extent and causes of medication problems 2002-2008
Elizabeth E Roughead and Susan J Semple,
Australian and New Zealand Health Policy, 2009, 6:18
This paper presents Part 1 of a two-part literature review examining medication safety in the Australian acute care setting. This review was undertaken for the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care to update a previous national report on medication safety conducted in 2002. This first part of the review examines the extent and causes of medication incidents and adverse drug events in health care.
Click here for details on the methodology, results and conclusions.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Effects of Two Commercial Electronic Prescribing Systems on Prescribing Error Rates in Hospital In-Patients: A Before and After Study
Joanna I Westbrook et al, 2011
Considerable investments are being made in commercial electronic prescribing systems (e-prescribing) in many countries. Few studies have measured or evaluated their effectiveness at reducing prescribing error rates, and interactions between system design and errors are not well understood, despite increasing concerns regarding new errors associated with system use. This study evaluated the effectiveness of two commercial e-prescribing systems in reducing prescribing error rates and their propensities for introducing new types of error.
Click here for the full research article.
Interruptions and medication administration errors, Safety and Health Informatics in Practice Series 2011, Vol 1, Issue 2. University of New South Wales
Highlights:
- 98 nurses were observed administering 4271 medications to 720 patients over 505 hours across two teaching hospitals
- Nurses were interrupted at least once in 53% of all drugs administered
- Each interruption was associated with a 12.1% increase in procedural failures (e.g. not correctly checking a patient’s identification) and a 12.7% increase in clinical errors (e.g. wrong dose)
- The association between interruptions and clinical errors was independent of hospital and nurse characteristics
The more nurses were interrupted the more errors and the more serious errors they made.
Click here to read more.
