A new study has found that more than 80 percent of nurses admit their workload makes it difficult to keep patients safe.
The most common errors affecting patient safety are related to medications, but can also include equipment and technology failures and patient falls.
Experts from the Najran University Hospital in Saudi Arabia surveyed 400 healthcare workers, including nurses, doctors and assistants, and studied the characteristics of nursing errors and strategies to reduce their incidence.
They found that “22 percent of nurses said they made mistakes that compromised patient safety, and 4 percent said their mistakes hurt the patient. Ten percent of malpractice nurses said it took longer to treat a patient. than it should have been, and 6 percent said the patient had side effects.”
In other cases, nearly 25 percent reported making medical errors, such as “delaying or refusing to treat a patient,” and about 20 percent of nurses admitted to using tools without first checking them. Meanwhile, 33 percent of study participants reported having a low perception of strategies they could use to reduce these errors.
These results prompted researchers to develop recommendations to reduce the incidence of patient safety errors caused by errors, including providing training to teams on patient safety and how to improve it; continuous evaluation of nursing errors; further study of the factors leading to errors; studying the reliability of new security measures after their implementation.
“There is room for improvement in areas such as avoiding injuries from evacuation equipment and avoiding documentation errors,” the researchers wrote of their findings. “These results provide a valuable contribution to ongoing efforts to improve patient safety and improve the overall quality of healthcare services. By identifying areas for improvement and suggesting practical solutions, the study provides valuable insights for healthcare administrators, practitioners and policy makers to effectively reduce nurse error and improve patient care.”