Strategies to Eliminate Medication Error among Undergraduate Nursing Students

The process of medication skill is a bit complex and involves multiple decisions. Therefore, it is important to consider that there are some factors which may contribute to the errors related to medication. Students enrolled in undergraduate nursing program are also trained for this complex process of medication administration with variety of learning strategies. Faculty provides facilitation and support as the skill is complex and very new for the learners. At times they also have to help the learner to overcome the hindrances occurring during medication administration process. The whole process is usually very time consuming and require full attention. As students are doing it first time on real set up they are usually anxious. This may therefore, lead to the chance of medication error. Thus, a retrospective study was conducted to identify the reported medication errors, their types and associated factors, through a document review, for the enrolled four year BScN students at AKUSONAM between 2010 to 2013. This paper aims to discuss about the possible factors which might have contributed towards the reported errors, even after moving with the vigilant process. Universal sampling process was used to recruit the samples from the population of all four year BScN program. Data was entered in, and analysed through SPSS version 19. Descriptive analysis was used to analyse the data. There were total 325 BScN students from 3 admission cohorts between 2010 and 2013. Reviewing the advisory files indicated that out of the total 325 students, seven errors (2.3%) were reported. There are some strategies that can decrease the rate of error in the undergraduate program.