When patient safety is compromised, it is critical to get to the root of the issue in order to determine how to ensure patient safety and avoid risks in the future. Nurses can use analytical techniques to determine root causes related to various types of errors. Medication error is a typical error that can be subject to process improvement in general, and root cause analysis in particular. This process came out of NASA after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and has been adopted by the health care industry. This week, you analyze a case related to medication error, and you examine how root cause analysis is applied to prevent future error and formulate process improvement plans.
Learning Objectives
Students will: