Insufficient Staffing and Medication Errors Essay

Insufficient Staffing and Medication Errors - Essay Example Understanding the different factors affecting health care delivery to the patients should be analyzed in order to make sure its objectives are attained. One of the issues that healthcare systems should address in order to optimize its role in delivering quality health care to its patients is medication error. Medication error is any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate use of harm to a patient while medication is in control of the health care professional, patient or consumer. Such events may be related to professional practice, health care products, procedures and system including prescribing, order communication, administration, education, monitoring, and use. According to various studies concerning errors in patient medications, there are around 7,000 to 7,400 people in the United States who dies due to such form of negligence. Specifically in New York, there is approximately 1,400 people die every year or twenty percent of medical injuries are due to medicati on errors. Lawsuits have been filed across the United States health care system as a result of medication errors, which exposed the patients into dangerous situations that eventually cause the death of some patients. According to the National Law Journal, out of the 13 largest medical negligence lawsuits in the US in 2002, seven of these were in New York alone. The number of deaths from medication errors in the US per year is at least one death every day. In addition, the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research found that a total of 1.3 million people are injured because of medication errors. Types of Medication errors Medication errors occur in different ways and at any degree. Medical negligence of this type may be made by any health care practitioner, from the nursing staff to the attending physicians. One type of medication error may be a misdiagnosis of a patient’s illness identified as a diagnostic error. A mistake as complicated as this, may result to more serious prob lems when made. Misdiagnosis could result to recommending an incorrect choice of therapy to the patient that would further injure them. Failure to use an indicated diagnostic test is also a result of diagnostic error that may cause a patient’s illness to become worse and very serious. Test results may also be misinterpreted due to an error in diagnosis. Patients suffer the consequences of not being able to get the right treatment to their illnesses when such diagnostic error happens. In addition, when patients are misdiagnosed, medical staff may not be able to correctly handle abnormal situations that are brought about by the patient’s illness or disease. Equipment failure is another form of medication error that is classified under this category. Some examples of this are dead batteries in defibrillators and easily dislodged or bumped valves of intravenous pumps. When such conditions are unnoticed, patients may have increased doses of medication over a short period of time that may be too dangerous, worse, fatal to the. Physicians are not spared in committing medication errors as well. The same thing goes with the nurses. Their roles require them to be in close contact with the patients. While physicians prescribe the medications or recommend the proper treatment necessary for the patients, the nurses are those who implement them.

Intellectual Disability Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Intellectual Disability - Essay Example One of these is Picture Exchange Communication System or P.E.C.S. This method uses discrete trail training to teach children using visual cues. There are a lot of visual cues available but there is also a Compic-programme computer that one can use in order to teach a student with autism. P.E.C.S teaches to exchange a visual cue on things that the student wants to tell, or when asking for something, or even make comments. He is being reinforced back with snacks or a praise when communication is done and effective. (Marsden, 2002) For example, a student who wants to play with a teddy bear may hand his compic of a teddy bear and teacher will give him a teddy bear to play with. One important advantage of teaching P.E.C.S is that autistic children, when well reinforced, develop less behavior problems. They are happier, less frustrated and more satisfied since their needs are met and their sense of independence is more practiced using this kind of method. This method can easily be administ ered, not only by teachers, but moreso, of parents with autistic children. Parents need to manifest efforts as their teacher s are doing so the teaching methods are not limited to the walls of the school. The ability to initiate and maintain social interaction determines ability to enhance relationships between parents or caregivers and children with autism. As shown in a study made by Stephenson and Dowrick (2005), responsitivity of parents to the behavior of children is recognized as a critical element in parent-child interaction and contributes not only to communicative development, but moreso on affective and mental development. It is highly important that parents and caregivers are educated on the teaching method of their child. Knowing the communicative content and appropriate usage of the context will greatly improve their communication with their child. A survey was made comparing between parents who can identify the signs, gestures, and body movements of their children but are not able to report sufficient detail on the context of the movements and its communicative content. and parents who have aside from identifying the body signs, gestures and body movements, know the context and communicative content of these movements. Results showed that parents who can identify the context of gestures and body movements are more educative of the communication method used on their child and tend to maintain an in-depth communicative relationship with their child. The behavior of the child is more satisfying because they are aware when to use certain gestures and at what context to use for. While picture-object relations is difficult for children with autism, another research was done to identify which effective teaching method is viable for children with language and communication disability and autism. Two methods namely the error prevention procedure and error correction procedure were both tested. Results showed that error prevention based teaching gives fewer errors than error correction method. A notable feature of these studies is that learning such relations often presents a major difficulty for children with language and developmental disabilities and autism. If learning is successful, usually this is achieved only through repeated teaching of the relation over many sessions;