Health Care Errors 

American Nurses Association (ANA) recognizes nurses' reluctance to report medication and other care errors but supports the recent Institute of Medicine (IOM) conclusion that it is vital to record and analyze errors and their contributing factors in order to plan preventive changes. IOM (November, 1999) outlined recommendations to create health care environments that encourage care providers to report errors and to establish a national focus for leadership and tools to broaden safety knowledge, to raise safety standards and expectations, to identify and learn from errors, and to create safety protocols within organizations.

 

IOM asserted that most errors are products of failures in the health care system not human carelessness. ANA added that nursing can uniquely contribute to the efforts by emphasizing the effects of inadequate or inappropriate staffing on the occurrences of errors. Leadership organizations created a National Coordinating Council for Medication Error Prevention (accessible through AMA's National Patient Safety Foundation at www.npsf.org) to develop strategies to promote safety rather than focus on punishment.

(Kany K. Am J Nurs 2000;100(2):86)

COMMENT: To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System can be read or ordered online. Medication errors are of a great concern to school nurses, especially those with multiple schools and large numbers of students - with or without assistive personnel or volunteers. School nurses should promote high standards of recording, analyzing errors and working (with local medical and nursing professionals not just school administrators) to prevent errors. --J.O.