The Usual Suspects
This drug is the most common medicine involved in errors leading to serious patient harm related to blood glucose levels.
What is Insulin?
This is when medication errors related to medication reconciliation typically occur
What is the transition of care (admission, transfer, discharge)
3 questions you must ask when entering a room to administer a drug
what are:
1. Name
2. DOB
3. Allergies
Never leave...
What is drugs unattended
Confusion between these two drugs may lead to administration errors that result in serious adverse patient outcomes (including death).
What are Morphine and Hydromorphine?
An important safety strategy recommended for ensuring that "right" preparation and administration occurs for high-risk medications and procedures.
What are independent second checks?
Dr. House would have no problem breaking into a patient's medicine cupboard to improve a "BPMH".
What is a Best Possible Medication History.
3 main causes for medication errors during administration.
What are:
1. interruptions/distractions to nursing staff
2. insufficient knowledge of pharmacology
3. incorrect safety checks
4. Difficulty performing drug calculations
Too many eMAR alerts can desensitize staff, leading to this condition, where important notifications such as late doses or potential drug interactions are ignored or overlooked.
What is "alert fatigue"
For this class of medications overdosing can lead to excessive bleeding and underdosing can lead to clot formation.
What are anticoagulants (heparin, warfarin, DOACs)?
You would have been "right" if you answered 5 to this question before 2008.
What is how many "rights" of safe medication administration are there ?
The name and number for the NSQHS standard which aims to ensure that clinicians safely prescribe, dispense and administer medicines.
What is standard 4 - Medication safety
Doing this to nurses during medication administration is significantly associated with increased number of medication errors and more severe errors
What are interruptions?
Opioids, cytotoxics and antibiotics are classified as high risk medications for this reason.
What are drugs that have a higher risk of causing serious harm if administered incorrectly?
All incidents, including near miss incidents, associated with medication use must be reported here.
What is IMS+ ?
54% of medication errors are made at this point of the medicines use process (prescribing, transcribing, preparation, administration, and monitoring).
What is the point of administration?
Implementing eMR in hospitals has reduced this type of error by approximately 50%, according to a study by the Australian Digital Health Agency.
What are prescribing errors?
This acronym assists clinicians to identify a group of medicines known to be associated with high risk for medication-related harm.
What is APINCHS?
This can occur when checking the "5 rights" if an individual confirms what they expect to see rather what is actually there
What is confirmation bias
This procedure ensures that the patient's medication list is accurate and up to date, preventing errors related to duplications, omissions, or incorrect orders during hospital admissions, transfers, or discharges.
What is Medication reconciliation?
35% of Aussies over the age of 70 take more than this number of medicines in a day.
What is 5 or more?
Increasing the risk of error due to polypharmacy.
Typographic technique that uses selective capitalisation to help make similar looking medicine names more easily distinguishable
Tallman lettering