PUBLISHED: Oct 8, 2018
Kelly Larrabee Robke, RN, MBA, MS; Rachelle Landry, RN, BSN
Patient-centric care is important in improving patients' perceived quality of care.¹ While many factors may influence the successes of the patient-centric care model, a patient's experiences with nursing activities over the course of a care encounter are reported to have the most direct impact on service and quality of care ratings.² ³ For this reason, it is essential for nurses at the bedside and leading patient care initiatives to share their knowledge in order to influence and lead in care delivery operations, including medication management.
As a major component of nursing value-added care activities, medication management activities represent a potential opportunity to influence and improve patient-centric care models. In the course of a shift, nurses are often challenged with fragmented or incomplete representation of information around medication delivery status, dispensing trends, and administration activities, all of which occur in a complex environment of care.
The medication administration process (MAP) can represent up to 40% of nursing activity. It involves assessing the patient, gathering medications, confirming the "rights" of medication management, administering medication, documenting administration and observing for therapeutic effects.4 In US healthcare, over 60% of patients are prescribed at least one medication; 15% take five or more medications.5 When caring for hospital inpatients, medication errors occur at a rate between 4.8-5.3%, and are the cause for 1 of 131 outpatient and 1 of 854 inpatient deaths.6 Providing nurse innovators and leaders with relevant, streamlined, and robust data around risk factors that contribute to medication management errors and adverse events represents one example of an area for innovation in future nursing practice. Nursing innovation and collaboration in medication management can position the nursing community as owners and inter-professional leaders of patient practice evolution, reflecting the underlying expectations that make nursing the most respected profession in the United States today.7
As the largest group of care providers in the US health system workforce,8 nurses serve in a unique role in which they both execute on ordered care and act as advocate for patients and their families to other parts of the healthcare delivery system.9 These factors have the potential to place nursing in a collaborative role, one in which they may influence the environment of care.9
To elevate nursing practice and advocate for our largest group of stakeholders, BD is launching an effort to partner with nurses and understand our nursing customers via the Nursing Activation Initiative. Through this initiative, nurses will be engaged to share their expertise in clinical care delivery, as clinician practitioners and inter-professional leaders with knowledge and beneficial perspectives that have the potential to drive medication management strategy.
Each month on the BD Institute for Medication Management Excellence blog, thought leaders explore topics of critical importance to medication management, and provide additional ways to learn.
Now that you've read about nursing industry trends in patient-centric care, discover an inescapable truth of medication errors as identified by a recent HIMSS Analytics survey.