1 4 8 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6
How Safe Are Your Medication Practices?
Reduce the risk of errors by reinforcing these 6 practice improvements.
D
rug-related adverse
events continue to
occur because the
surgical setting can be a high-
intensity, high-stress environ-
ment where basic precautions
are sometimes ignored or for-
gotten. Protect your patients
from harm by following these
6 safe practices.
Smart storage
Standardize how you organize medications in storage areas and
anesthesia carts. Make drug identification easier by color-coding the
various types of agents, making sure labels' sizes, positions and font
styles are consistently applied, and use barcodes on syringes, solu-
tions and containers. Storing medications in a standardized tray on
the anesthesia cart lets providers easily find needed drugs and
reduces the likelihood that they'll choose the wrong agent. Label look-
alike and sound-alike drugs with warnings for staff to double-check
that they've selected the intended agent. It also helps to capitalize the
unique differentiating syllable of each medication to draw attention to
the difference (EPINephrine vs. NORepinephrine, for example).
Consistent labeling
The regulatory requirements for labeling medications drawn into
syringes are commonly designed for a multi-person pathway that's typi-
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Safety
Jerry A. Cohen, MD
• END RESULT Many preventable factors contribute to accidentally administering the wrong drug.
Pamela
Bevelhymer,
RN,
BSN
