Date of Conferral
2016
Degree
Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP)
School
Nursing
Advisor
Stoerm S. Anderson
Abstract
According to the National Patient Safety Foundation, more than 1.5 million Americans are affected by medication errors because of varied factors including miscommunication, bad handwriting, name confusion, poor packaging, and metric or other dosing unit errors. This project addressed medication errors and adverse drug events by developing policy and practice guidelines to support and aid the utilization of health information technology (HIT) systems in addressing medication errors and adverse drug events at a local nursing home in Cincinnati, Ohio. The National Quality Strategy Framework was used by a team of interdisciplinary stakeholders as a guide for the development of policies and practice guidelines. An interdisciplinary project team of institutional stakeholders was led by the DNP student through a review of literature to assess the effectiveness of current policies and guidelines and explore areas for improvement. New policy, practice guidelines, and educational materials were developed, along with plans for implementing and evaluating the policies in the institution. Policy and practice guidelines were shared with 4 scholars possessing expertise in health information technology to validate content of the products. Feedback was used to inform revision and preparation of final policy, practice guidelines, educational materials, and plans for implementation and evaluation. The implementation plan advocates a process that includes multiple stakeholders and institutional preparatory stages. The evaluation plan addresses multiple outcomes related to efficiency and patient safety, and proposes both intermediate and long-term evaluation based on comparisons of pre-post metrics routinely collected by the institution. Following implementation and evaluation, dissemination of results of the project may stimulate positive social change by reducing medication errors in similar health care institutions that adopt related measures.
Recommended Citation
Johnson, Marion, "Developing Policies and Guidelines to Prevent Medication Errors and ADEs in Nursing Homes" (2016). Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies. 2088.
https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/dissertations/2088
