Medication errors that result in death, physical and/or mental challenges are inexcusable to the patients and their loved ones. There are several types of medication errors and prevention begins with recognizing the causes and developing possible solutions in order to limit the occurrences. Prevention of these errors is an immediate need considering the analysis that they are one of the leading causes of medical grievances in the United States.
Infant Death
In the case study, “Understanding the Causes and Costs of Medication Errors”, a medication error lead to the death of an infant who was one day old. There were more than fifty latent and active failures that occurred throughout the series of events that lead to the infant’s death that began with the pharmacists and ended with the nursing staff. The laws that were broken in this case weren’t in the hands of a single individual or component however; there were liable parties: nursing staff, pharmacist, manufacturer, physician, health department, and hospital administration.
Laws Broken
The administration of a medication act is when a single dose of a prescribed drug is given to a patient by an authorized person in accordance with the federal and state laws and regulations, (Pozgar, 2009). This law wasn’t adhered to by the nursing staff involved in this case. The unauthorized nurse practitioner altered the way the medication was prescribed to the patient by administering the medication through an IV instead of an IM injection in accordance to the pharmacist’s orders. This misconception began with the assumption that the medication prescribed was actually a brand name of another medication that could be administered through an IV.
A prescription error also occurred when a pharmacist misread the orders from the infectious disease specialists and the health department. The order was written for a