Nurses’ Experiences And Perspectives On Medication Safety Practices: A Qualitative Study

Related Research Articles on Nursing and Medication Safety Practices

Discuss about the Importance of Medical Safety.

Research is quite important in studies because it makes it possible to collect data, analyze it and make meaningful conclusions. It serves to inform action in order to seek findings which can be integrated into a larger research body. This is so because the findings from a representative sample can be generalized for the whole population. This means that research should be of high quality in order to get accurate and representative results (Lewis, 2015). In this critical analysis, the article titled ‘Nurses’ experiences and perspectives on medication safety practices: an explorative qualitative study’ will be used. This is a qualitative study written by Marian Smeulers, Astrid Onderwater, Myra van Zwieten, and Hester Vermeulen, in the year 2014, and published in the Journal of Nursing management, 22(3), 276-285. This essay will critique the introduction, research problem, data collection, research methodology, data analysis, results, discussion, limitations and strength, and conclusion. Initially, the authors acknowledge the importance of medical safety in order to avoid the possibility of medical errors on health care practice (Smeulers et al., 2014). Medical errors are events which cause inappropriate use of medications, but can be prevented before they occur through the adoption of proper measures (Verghese et al., 2015).
The medication error occurs at the control of the health care professional or at the patient level. According to Smeulers et al., (2014), out of the possible medical administrations, medical errors incidence are at 5 and 25 % with a third of these errors occurring in the process of preparing and administering the medication to the patients. These errors are characterized by violations of principles involving the route of administration, dosage, wrong drug, wrong patient and time among many more (Lane et l., 2014). It is however worth noting that medication errors occur due to the environmental factors surrounding the health care as well as the high level of workload that the nurses come across. Therefore this study was conducted in order to determine the perceptions of the nurses concerning the safety of medications in their practice.

This used an explorative form of study which is qualitative in nature. Explorative study is justified in this case because it aimed at getting the exact facts from the nurses who are the main characters at the point of heath care (Hadar et al., 2014). Moreover an explorative study was appropriate because the issue of medication errors has not been clearly studies. These types of research make it possible to determine the best research approach for use especially for data collection purposes.  Initially, the study was prepared in Academic Medical center which is a tertiary care university hospital in Netherlands. In this facility, the physicians use an electronic form of medical prescriptions, while records are made on paper based prescriptions (Smeulers et al., 2014). This choice of the research site was appropriate because it dwelt on the actual issue under study which is the medication errors.

Since this was a qualitative study, it involved seeking consent from the nurses. Initially, the researchers sent emails to nursing managers and nursing ward managers to request them to participate in this qualitative (Smeulers et al., 2014). This seeking of consent was appropriate because under the ethical principles of research, it is crucial for a research participant to choose whether to participate in a research study or not. In order to get the names of the nurses from other departments in this facility, the snow ball sampling method was used (Waters, 2015).  The inclusion criteria however was that the nurses were supposed to be registered with relevant bodies. Setting up the inclusion criteria is important so as to ensure that the sample being used meets all the criteria of the research. It also makes it possible to have the exact sample that contains the information of interest. However, these researchers failed to mention the exclusion criteria. However, I believe that the aspect of one being registered or not was not satisfactory because, as long as a nurse is in practice, they have the ability to give the required information. This study used semi structured interviews, whereby each interview lasted for one to one and a half hours. In my opinion I think that this interview tool a short time because probably not all information would have be covered in such a short time. Moreover, it would have been better if the study participants received information concerning the purpose of the research before the actual data collection began. This would have made them aware and so as to enable them disclose the vital information. Assuring the participants before the data collection that the information to be collected will be confidential is also important since handling health information is quite critical.

Choosing Among Five Approaches for Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design

While the researchers coded data and made meeting before analysis, this was justified so as to do data clean up from the interviews. However, it would not be advisable to perform data analysis in parallel with data collection (Smeulers et al., 2014). I would prefer that the actual interview process would be completed first then, data analysis would follow later on so as to give an overall picture and trend of the obtained data for the purposes of interpretation (Chambers, 2017). In this research the authors have not indi9cated the tool that was used for data analysis. The use of a certain data analysis software makes it possible to factor in various factors in the data as well as the eventual data presentation.
The researchers were able to bring out the answers to the question under study. In this case, they went ahead and identified two more factors the medication safety: the role of nurse in medication safety, their ability to work in a safe manner while offering care, and finally their level of acceptance of the practice safety (Smeulers et al., 2014).  However, the manner in which the data has been presented is very poor. It would have been better if the authors used tables, charts and graphs to present the data so as to give a quick and general data trend at a glance. To make the article more appealing, the authors would use a numbering system so as to follow points in a chronological way.

The discussion is properly presented by the authors in order to give a relationship between the present findings and the existing literature. This makes it easy for the readers to get the flow and the current level of medication errors as well as the level of nurse awareness in reducing them (Karavasiliadou & Athanasakis, 2014). At the same time, the authors recommend a need to determine the type of medications which are of high risk to which class of patients in order to lower the problem of medical errors.

The authors have cleared indicated the strengths because these findings were similar to previous studies and thus can be adopted and relevant. However, there are no limitations which have been mentioned. It is important to mention the limitations of a research in order to determine the reliability of the findings, or for purposes of replicating the same study in future to minimize errors.

Conclusion

The conclusion is correctly stated because it emphasized the problem of medication errors which was being evaluated. To implement safety practices is thus not enough because the nurses need to be sensitized on their personal role in maintaining patient safety by minimizing medication errors as much as possible. This study can thus be used in health care because it supports patients safety which is the core importance of medical procedures. The nurses should thus ensure that they minimize medical errors by being careful when administering medications to minimize errors which may cause potential negative consequences to patients.

References

Smeulers, M., Onderwater, A. T., Zwieten, M. C., & Vermeulen, H. (2014). Nurses’ experiences and perspectives on medication safety practices: an explorative qualitative study. Journal of nursing management, 22(3), 276-285. doi: 10.1111/jonm.12225. Epub 2014 Mar 18.

Lewis, S. (2015). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five approaches. Health promotion practice, 16(4), 473-475. doi.org/10.1177/1524839915580941

Waters, J. (2015). Snowball sampling: a cautionary tale involving a study of older drug users. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 18(4), 367-380. doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2014.953316

Verghese, A., Charlton, B., Kassirer, J. P., Ramsey, M., & Ioannidis, J. P. (2015). Inadequacies of physical examination as a cause of medical errors and adverse events: a collection of vignettes. The American journal of medicine, 128(12), 1322-1324. doi: 10.1016/j.amjmed.2015.06.004. Epub 2015 Jul 2.

Chambers, J. M. (2017). Graphical Methods for Data Analysis: 0. Chapman and Hall/CRC. https://www.crcpress.com/Graphical-Methods-for-Data-Analysis/Chambers/p/book/9781315893204

Lane, S. J., Troyer, J. L., Dienemann, J. A., Laditka, S. B., & Blanchette, C. M. (2014). Effects of skilled nursing facility structure and process factors on medication errors during nursing home admission. Health care management review, 39(4), 340-351. doi: 10.1097/HMR.0000000000000000.

Karavasiliadou, S., & Athanasakis, E. (2014). An inside look into the factors contributing to medication errors in the clinical nursing practice. Health science journal, 8(1). https://www.hsj.gr/medicine/an-inside-look-into-the-factors-contributing-to-medication-errors-in-the-clinical-nursing-practice.php?aid=2779

Hadar, I., Soffer, P., & Kenzi, K. (2014). The role of domain knowledge in requirements elicitation via interviews: an exploratory study. Requirements Engineering, 19(2), 143-159. doi>10.1007/s00766-012-0163-2