Introduction: Errors in medicine administration are a serious and complicated problem in
clinical practice, especially in intensive therapy units, where patients may suffer highly
serious consequences due to the critical nature of their disease and pharmacotherapeutic
programs performed there. Purpose: The aim of this paper was to determine, based on
relevant literature, what errors in medicine administration are the most common among
nurses working in intensive therapy units and what healthcare interventions could prevent or
reduce these errors. Methods: In this paper, we used the descriptive method of literature
overview, which was mostly based on foreign professional literature. Literature was
searched using the following keywords: »medicinske sestre« IN »napake pri uporabi zdravil
v enoti intenzivne terapije« / »nurses« AND » ICU medication errors«, »medicinske sestre«
IN »intervencije za zmanjševanje napak pri uporabi zdravil« / »nurses« AND »interventions
to reduce medication errors«, ter »medicinske sestre« IN »prijavljanje napak pri uporabi
zdravil« / »nurses« AND »reporting medication errors«. In total, 11 articles were analysed.
Results: The most common errors in medicine administration were inaccurate medicine
dose, inaccurate application interval and inaccurate infusion flow rate. The reasons for these
errors in medicine administration were tiredness and overwhelmingness of nurses, the lack
of pharmacological knowledge, errors in transcribing doctor's orders, disturbing factors in
intensive therapy units, etc. In order to improve the reporting of errors in medicine
administration, head nurses and other personnel will have to develop a safe environment for
nurses in which nurses will not be accused of and punished for reporting an error. Discussion
and conclusion: Nurses play a key role in preventing errors in medicine administration, as
they are the ones who prepare and also administer these medicines. Errors in medicine
administration could be reduced to a great extent by providing regular training of nurses,
introducing a clinical pharmacist in the work process in intensive therapy units and
implementing electronic doctor's orders for medicines instead of having nurses transcribe
the orders manually. When it comes to preventing and reducing errors in medicine
administration, there is still a lot of room for improvement, especially in regard to creating
a safe environment to report errors in medicine administration.
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