For about a month Grand River Hospital has been testing a new initiative geared at decreasing the number of medication errors in the hospital.
“Medication safety has always been there, but we’ve kind of been able to zero-in on some of the things that are potential for creating the errors,” said program director of surgery Robinne Hausk.
The project helped staff to zero in interruptions that may occur while a nurse sorts or administers medications. Whether it is the administration of a patient’s regular pills, antibiotics and narcotics, the issue of mix-ups is something staff chose to pursue as an opportunity for improvement.
“We have reports every month that detail probable causes of error. It was actually a hypothesis that we had based on that information. We did some timed studies that actually proved the number of interruptions nurses were receiving as it co-related to the errors that were happening,” explained Kim Robinson, clinical manager of the inpatient surgical unit.
The study proved that up to a third of the mistakes matched the staff hypothesis of errors occurring due to avoidable interruptions during sorting and administration of medication at the hospital. The study noted that mistakes occurred while staff were busy with for high volumes of patients and were dealing with multiple interactions at the same time while handling medications.
“If a nurse is interrupted there’s a chance an error could occur. …We could give the wrong medication, we could give the wrong dose – those are the big problems. It could lead to a death if we weren’t really careful. That’s never happened but it could happen,” Hausk explained.
As a result, the hospital now has a ‘safety space’ where nurses can dispense and mix medications in private and focus on the task at hand.
A month’s worth of data has been collected since the implementation of the private spaces. Over this span the unit has seen a 50 per cent decrease in the amount of errors cause by interruptions.
Robinson said part of the strategy involved with rolling out such a project is including patients in the process by educating them on the reasons for the change in policy.
Though the new initiative has brought forth some solid results, hospital patients are not ignorant of possible mix-ups.
“Patients are aware that there can always be an error in their medication and we like patients to be accountable for that; we like them to ask questions about their medication at the bedside when a nurse is dispensing them. So if their pills look different, ask some questions about that. Patients are very aware that there is some accountability on their part,” Hausk added.
The hospital’s surgical unit is heading the initiative and has conducted presentations sharing their findings with other units who they hope, will start utilizing the new model as well.
