Week 3:  Medical Errors and Patient Safety

Welcome to the Collaboration Café. In specific weeks of the course, you will have the opportunity to collaborate with your classmates in the Collaboration Café for a graded assignment (50 points). The Collaboration Café is an interactive process between the students. Faculty involvement in the Café will be minimal, however, faculty will monitor this section for compliance and clarification. There are no scholarly references required in this discussion format. The idea is for you to share and learn from your classmates about real-life experiences. Pleaser refer to the guidelines and grading rubric below for more information on the Collboration Café.

Please watch the following video, Transparency, Compassion, and Truth in Medical Errors: Leilani Schweitzer at TEDxUniversityofNevada,Links to an external site. and address the following prompt:

As you look back over your career as a nurse or even as a nursing student, can you think of a time when you were either involved in or aware of an adverse medical error with a patient that compromised patient safety? What did you learn from this experience? What did the organization learn from this experience?Week 3 Medical Errors and Patient Safety

Solution:

One adverse medication error that compromised a patients’ safety is an overdose of sedation medication in a patient who had come for a hip reduction following a severe fall which causes severe pain on his hip. The provider present prescribed the standard dosage of the sedative medication but the desired sedation was not achieved. The provider increased the dosage after noting that the patients’ drug use history and weight status needed higher dosages to achieve sedation. After successfully achieving sedation, the patients’ hip was reduced successfully. Following the procedure, the patient was placed on an automatic blood pressure machine and a pulse oximeter. He was however not placed on supplemental oxygen and his ECG and respiration were left unmonitored despite the protocol requiring it. Due to the busy nature of the nurses and alarm fatigue, the nurses missed the alarm alerting them for reduced BP and the patients’ oxygen saturation levels began