By Christina Orlovsky, senior staff writer
This year marked five years since the Institute of Medicine released its infamous report on medical errors. Since then, nationwide campaigns have been launched to improve patient safety and an abundance of research has looked into what steps have been made by physicians, hospitals and administrators. One recent survey sought out the patient safety perceptions of those caregivers in the midst of all the action: frontline nurses.
In conjunction with the 2005 Nursing Leadership Congress in June, McKesson Corporation revealed the findings from a national research survey of 216 frontline registered nurses. The company commissioned Harris Interactive to conduct the survey in order to gain a better understanding of frontline nurses’ attitudes toward patient and medication safety.
“Since the IOM report, a lot of surveying has been done of physicians and administrators,” said Mary Beth Navarra, RN, MBA, vice president of medication safety at McKesson Corporation. “We wanted to ask nurses about their perceptions because they’re on the front line. We wanted to know what they thought has occurred as far as improvement, as well as what we have left to do.”
Results showed that the majority of nurses (72 percent) felt that progress has been made to improve patient and medication safety within the past five years. Yet many believe there is still a lot of work that needs to be done. In fact, 94 percent of respondents reported witnessing one or more medication errors within the past five years—a statistic that has likely led to the nurses’ own feelings about personal safety if they were to become a hospital patient.
When asked how safe they would feel as a patient, only 34 percent of respondents said they would feel safe in any hospital, while 57 percent said they’d feel safe in their own hospital. The majority of respondents, 66 percent, reported that they would feel either “somewhat unsafe” or “not safe at all” as a patient in any hospital.
“What is most telling is the fact that 94 percent of nurses had witnessed one or more serious medical errors in the past five years,” Navarra explained. “This increases their own fear about what could happen to them personally. In their world and their context, if they’re still witnessing errors, they’re still going to have fear.”
In order to combat these fears, the next step is to overcome some of the barriers to improving patient safety. Nurses identified the shortage as the number one roadblock.
“The conclusion we’ve come to is that we’ve made a lot of improvements, but we still have a long way to go,” Navarra added. “The nursing shortage was by far cited as the number one barrier to this improvement. The hard message is there’s only so much you can do, based on demographics, so you need to look at ways to provide safety nets and improve efficiencies for the staff you do have to provide safe patient care.”
One way to do this would be to streamline and improve processes through the implementation of technology and the creation of communication systems. While most nurses in the survey reported that they knew technology was a great tool to reduce medication errors (80 percent), the majority had not used these new technologies. The one exception was automated medication dispensing cabinets, which were used by 70 percent of respondents. Other noted technology was less frequently used. Barcode technology, for example, was only reportedly used by 23 percent of respondents.
When it comes to implementing these patient safety measures, Navarra explained that change must begin with the overall facility culture.
“A lot of success is recognizing there is a problem and developing systems to support nurses and other caregivers,” she said. “Developing a new culture is about looking progressively at a technology plan and changing the face of nursing and the work they do and role they play within patient care.”
For more information, visit the McKesson Corporation or Harris Interactive Web sites.
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