Interrupting nurses when they are administering medication could prove dangerous it could lead to medication errors, according to a report in the April 26 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Laboratory studies have demonstrated that interruptions during a task contribute to inefficiency and errors, the authors write as background information in the article.
Experimental studies suggest that interruptions produce negative impacts on memory by requiring individuals to switch attention from one task to another," the authors write. "Returning to a disrupted task requires completion of the interrupting task and then regaining the context of the original task."
Medication errors occur as often as once per patient per day in some settings, and approximately one-third of harmful medication errors are thought to occur during medication administration. Johanna I. Westbrook, PhD, of the University of Sydney, Australia, and colleagues studied nurses preparing and administering medications in six wards of two major teaching hospitals. Interruptions were noted and two types of errors were tracked: procedural failures, including failure to read labels, check patient identification or record administration on medication chart; and clinical errors, including wrong drug, dose, formulation or strength.
The 98 nurses were observed while preparing and administering 4271 medications to 720 patients over 505 hours from September 2006 through March 2008. Only 19.8 per cent of these administrations were free of both kinds of errors. At least one procedural failure occurred in 74.4 per cent of administrations and at least one clinical failure in 25 per cent. Interruptions occurred during 53.1 per cent of administrations.
