Safety Precautions for Nurses while delivering Medications to Patients Essay

Safety Precautions for Nurses while delivering Medications to Patients - Essay Example â€Å"A medication error is any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm while the medication is in the control of the health care professional, patient, or consumer. Such events may be related to professional practice, health care products, procedures, and systems, including prescribing; order communication; product labeling, packaging, and nomenclature; compounding; dispensing; distribution; administration; education; monitoring; and use" (National Coordinating Council for Medication Error Reporting and Prevention, 2012, p. 1). From the definitions, these errors are an action that are apparently committed and are divergent from the intended act; and, as a consequence fails to adhere to the principles of safety and conformity to the delivery of the highest quality of patient care, as expected from the health care profession. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) appropriately provided definitions of patient safety and quality of care as presented from the paper written by Mitchell. Accordingly, the IOM was reported to have provided the definition of quality as â€Å"the degree to which health services for individuals and populations increase the likelihood of desired health outcomes and are consistent with current professional knowledge† (Lohr, 1990; cited in Mitchell, 2008, p. 1). As such, quality of care incorporates elements that ensures patient safety and the delivery of highy quality of health services. Concurrently, patient safety was defined by the IOM as â€Å"the prevention of harm to patients† (Aspden, Corrigan, Wolcott, & al., 2004; cited in Mitchell, 2008, p. 2). The nursing theory that espouses both patient safety and quality of care is adherence to the principles of beneficence and least harm: to do good and to possibly inflict the minimum possible harm, if not at all preventable. In this regard, several studies have already tried to