18 Nov 2019

Interprofessional collaboration among various disciplines of healthcare settings can significantly enhance patient care and reduce medication errors.

 It was on that note that Clinical Pharmacist Ms Archele Truter emphasised the need for doctors, nurses and pharmacists to work together in reducing medication errors and cut down on avoidable causalities.

Speaking at the medication errors symposium recently, Ms Truter said a comprehensive and efficient patient care was difficult to achieve without good communication between healthcare professionals.

She said health professionals needed to enter into collaborative relationship by means of integrating their services with other healthcare professionals in an effort to achieve improved clinical outcomes and optimise patient care.

Ms Truter stated that nurses and doctors played an important role in developing a collaborative relationship with pharmacist as they were the most communicating person with the patient.

“A nurse can give valuable information to a pharmacist regarding a patient condition which would aid a pharmacist in optimising therapeutic plan as per patient needs,” she said.

Moreover the relationship between pharmacists and nurses, she said was also of great importance as many hospital pharmacies used floor stock system to distribute medications to the nursing stations in all patient care areas.

She indicated that various studies had revealed that the expectation of nurses showed they wanted pharmacist to review the prescription and make necessary interventions, if required, for the betterment of the patient care.

 Ms Truter further cautioned that the health professions cohesiveness should not only concentrate on the outpatient units but should also extend to paediatric wards and intensive care units as patients in those wards were also vulnerable to medication errors.

A large number of the errors involved incorrect dosing, followed by the omission of medication and medicine given at the wrong time.

“Some of the errors in the wards include nurses forgetting to order antibiotics, drips not inserted on patients to get medication, medication given at irregular interval, medicine mixed with tap water instead of sterile water and one needle used to reconstitute all intravenous medication for the ward,” she said.

She noted that most errors occurred during prescription and administration of medication,advising that dosing errors should be introduced alongside regular discussions on preventative measures among the multidisciplinary teams.

Ms Truter noted that paediatric patients were particularly prone to medication errors as they were classified as the most fragile population in a hospital setting. Ends