Analyze a Current Health Care Problem or Issue

Analyze a Current Health Care Problem or Issue

As mentioned previously, medication errors continue to dominate the healthcare system despite efforts to mediate them. Though not all medication errors are preventable, continuing to establish guidelines and preventive measures are a step in the right direction. This proves to be difficult as there aren’t any mandatory statistics, and reporting errors is voluntary. This assessment will dive deeper into the issues presented with medication errors in healthcare and other detrimental effects patients experience. Throughout healthcare settings, many risk factors have been identified that contribute to medication errors.In health care, an error has been defined by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) as "the failure of a planned action to be completed as intended (error of execution) or the use of a wrong plan to achieve an aim (error of planning). An error may be an act of commission or an act of omission (Schmidt, 2017). Working together and continuing to establish and recognize risk factors will further assist in vastly reducing medication errors.

Identifying Elements of the Problem/Issue

While studying and attempting to establish the prevalence of medication errors, a broad- based study determined 81% of participants took medication in the week prior to the survey. (Schmidt, 2017). While receiving care at health care organizations, medication errors causing adverse events are widely under reported. Due to this being a voluntary process, it is difficult to determine direct cause and effect issues that result in medication errors and the relation to adverse events in healthcare settings, though risk factors have been identified to contribute to the issue. With the varying degrees of medication errors vs. medication adverse events, there have been categories created to more specifically identify and help diminish medication errors caused by human error. (Schmidt, 2017). This involves identifying which category a medication...

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