Critical-Care Nurses Are Patients' Safety Net against Medical Errors
By Christina Orlovsky, senior staff writer
Nurses play a critical role in the provision of patient care. A recent study has found that they also provide crucial protection against medical errors, recognizing, interrupting and correcting situations before a potentially dangerous outcome occurs.
Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, Massachusetts, studied the incidence and types of errors noticed and corrected by nurses in a 10-bed coronary care unit between 2003 and 2004. They collected data for 147 days and during 150 hours of direct observation.
During the investigation, 142 recovered medical errors occurred. The most common errors that were caught and corrected were medication errors, which accounted for 73 percent of the total errors. Wrong dose, wrong patient, wrong medication, wrong route and omitted medication were all observed, and the most common medications were anticoagulants, electrolyte solutions and vasopressors.
Of the 142 errors that were found, 69 percent were intercepted before they reached the patient; of the 31 percent that did reach the patient, 13 percent were remedied before resulting in harm and 18 percent were improved before they caused more severe harm.
Lead researcher Jeffrey Rothschild, M.D., MPH, reported that the actions of the nurses examined in the study demonstrate the key value of nurses’ close attention to medication and patient safety.
“Recovery from medical error by nurses during patient care is often considered routine and is both under-recognized and under-appreciated by non-nursing staff. It’s time for that to change,” Rothschild said.
“The role of the nurse is vital to a patient’s safety and serves as an additional safety net,” he added. “By studying and understanding the nurse’s role in intercepting errors we can hopefully steer future research toward improving the likelihood of recovery from medical errors.”
Rothschild concluded that the study provides significant evidence in support of hospital initiatives that advocate for nurse error recovery and error reporting in an effort to improve patient safety.
“Safe hospitals encourage and support the role of nurses to recognize medical errors that have the potential for patient harm, and then empower these nurses to take necessary actions to avoid adverse events,” he said.
The study was published in the Feb. 2006 issue of the Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety.
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