Pharmacy Corner
RESOURCES FOR PHARMACY

28/05/2008

Study Links Nursing Staff Shortage With Medication Errors

Consider the following scenario: The Italian restaurant down the road has recently let go of four servers. The remaining staff must now work longer hours and take on more responsibilities. The outcome: overburdened employees and occasional order mix ups. Consider this scenario now replacing ‘Italian restaurant’ with ‘hospital’, and where the employees are not servers but nurses; the outcome may be more compelling (as nurses rarely administer fine Italian cuisine).

A recent study conducted by Statistics Canada finds that nurses working extra shifts due to understaffing are more likely to make medication errors. The study is based on a 2005 survey of 19,000 nurses where “19 % of respondents reported having made ‘occasional’ or ‘frequent’ drug errors in the previous year”. The study finds that a majority of these medication mistakes are attributable to nurses experiencing “overtime, increased workload, staffing shortages, unsupportive colleagues and poor on-the-job relations with doctors”. In fact “among registered nurses who routinely worked overtime, 22 per cent reported making medication mistakes, compared with 14 per cent of those who did not work extra hours”. Lisa Little, Director of Public Policy for the Canadian Nurses Association makes a point of noting that “the study is very clear that these errors are not related to nurses’ experience level of education and that these are truly related to aspects of the work environment”. With fewer nurses and more patients “nurses may have had five patients in a medical ward to look after and now they’re looking after eight or nine patients”. The increasing demands placed on nurses today do not benefit patient safety. Professor Diane Doran supports this notion, stating that the “nursing work environment is inadequate to support patient care”. In attempting to do more, nurses are more vulnerable to making dangerous mistakes.

For further details, the full study can be found at: ctv.ca