Reducing healthcare medication administration errors using a mixed intervention strategy: an overview

Abstract

Patient safety is the avoidance and decrease in risks and harm in healthcare systems, which is essential when providing care for patients since it appears to be one of the markers of quality care. A medical error is described as an unplanned action or one that fails to produce the desired result. The most frequent type of medical error is medication error, which has been extensively studied in the past. This paper gives an overview of reducing healthcare medication administration errors, reflecting on the guidelines, policies, and laws at the national and international levels, adopting the fishbone cause and effects analysis, intervention plan for reducing medication error (Mixed Intervention Strategy), potential limitation/alteration to the intervention plans and the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle as a strategy to test the effectiveness of the change implementation.