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It is a common misconception among beginning nursing students that every medication listed for patient’s is safe to administer. What they don’t realize is that patient condition’s can change or mistakes can happen during order entry. Nurses must use their critical thinking skills during each step of medication administration to protect patients from dangerous side effects, drug interactions and contraindications. In this article, we will look at how instructors can add embedded errors into simulations to help prevent students from making medication errors in clinical practice. 

Simulated Medication Errors

As nurses are the ones who administer medications directly to patients, they are the last line of defense in catching dangerous medication errors. These errors can result in harm to patients, prolonged hospital stays, increased healthcare costs, and legal liability. Errors can occur at any step of the medication process - prescription, verification, preparation, delivery and administration. In fact, medication errors are the most common mistakes reported by new nurses as they begin their professional careers. If all of their early practice with medication administration is uneventful, students may not appreciate how easily mistakes can occur. Simulated medication errors can impact students’ emotional memory so that they fully appreciate the risks that are associated with medication administration. Students then become more committed to using their critical thinking skills to adopt risk-reduction strategies.  

Creating Medication Errors for Training Scenarios

It is not difficult to include medication errors in simulated patient profiles and administration records. In an example of an online pharmacology class, students typically have weekly assignments to review simulated MARs. They identify each medication class and why it was ordered for that patient. They indicate whether or not the medication should be administered and provide their rationale. Usually there is almost always one medication that’s not safe to give to the patient. Here is an embedded, wide variety of errors example assignments provided by our nurse educator, Sally O’Meara:

SimServeRx Patient Profiles

This teaching approach can be so effective, which is why DiaMedical USA offers medication errors in the SimServeRx patient profiles. Each Patient Profile includes basic shift report information with recent lab values and four medications that are to be administered. Students must use their critical thinking skills to determine which medications should be administered or clarified with the prescriber. They provide students with opportunities to use recent lab results and patient assessment findings to decide whether or not each medication should be administered. Students must also identify additional information from the shift report, interpret lab results, identify key nursing assessments and practice SBAR communication with physicians. All of the patient information and simulated medication barcodes are pre-loaded in the SimServeRx Automated Dispensing system so that it is ready for instructors to use. Medication packages are also available for each patient profile to make ordering supplies easy and convenient. 

Final Thoughts

Sometimes small assignments can have a big impact on students. This was certainly true for the simulated MARs with embedded errors in Sally O’Meara's pharmacology course. Instructors can easily create similar experiences for their own students with the SimServeRx patient profiles. The DiaMedical USA team is ready to help instructors use SimServeRx patient profiles to create simulated medication administration experiences for their students. SimRx, Practi-meds and DemoDose simulated medications are also available to provide complete training solutions. For more information, reach out to a DiaMedical USA expert at 877-593-6011 or info@diamedicalusa.com

Sally O’Meara MSN, RN, is the on-staff nurse educator for DiaMedical USA. She has over 30 years of experience as a registered nurse and has been teaching nursing courses for the last 15 years. She has a variety of experience using high and low fidelity simulation for healthcare education a