SectionsShould drug administration involve two nurses?
Should drug administration involve two nurses? What do you think?
In our practice comment this week Jennifer Kelly states that hospitalised patients with swallowing difficulties (dysphagia) are three times more likely to suffer medicine administration errors (MAEs) than patients without dysphagia. Of greater concern is that the errors found were not minor.
She suggested that single-handed drug administration means that nurses are often unaware that they have made errors and so they are unable to correct or report them.
Anonymous | 12-Jan-2013 2:32 pm ah, words of great wisdom at last!
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Thanks. I find it hard to believe that anyone thinks pharmacists should do the drugs, or even be there. This refusal of some to move on is a farce. We have nurses that can't take blood or cannulate. These are basic skills. Basic. Ask a phlebotomist. This issue has so much to with the fact that those thay hold us back are akin to an insidious malignancy. People need to accept that the public image of the nurse is looooong dead. And this change will have to occur from within. We are preserving a myth for no reason other than the necessary change in role challenged practitionerw who naively assumed that they coukd exiwt in a vacuum despite living in one of the greatest eras of developing medical technology. We could hqve made absokuteky massive gains between 1960 and 1980, instead we allowed the profession to flounder and that time cannot be retrieved. Nor can we pretend that the other medical and health fields have anything in common with us or are with us. They are not. Physios , OTs and so on have far less responsibility and sphere of practice yet try to find one that earns less than you. You wont. And they did it by defining their own practice and suiting themselves. Hence why for some reason they do not work afrer 5 or 6 or weekends or bank holidays. A profession not subjext to hideous outdated gender politics or self absorbed in some fantasy history would have exerted influence on behalf of the profession and the patients so you could get TTOs after 6 or at 5 on a weekend. Modernity is the only thing that will save nursing not this self harming romanticising of a lousy past. Nursing is not a vocation, nor was it ever. It was a career that was widely socially permissable along with teacher, midwife, air hostess and so on. Nursing is a profession. Whoever does not see it as such disrespects all of us. Back to the topic, the isssue relates to not having the right people teaching. Nursing needs to join the mix of classes in universities that are relevant: Physiologists for the body Pharmacologists/pharmacists for the drugs Nurses for nursing theory that directly links to these things. The sooner we use science and leave behind this feminine and false concept of care the sooner standards and rewards will rise.
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