Quality improvement in medication administration Research Paper

Quality improvement in medication administration - Research Paper Example This research will begin with the statement that medication administration forms the key performance improvement area in Carlinville Area Hospital as a  strategy of alleviating liabilities and costs that may arise due to lapses in drug administration. Medication administration is one of the sensitive areas of public health that is highly controlled by a number of statutes both federal and state. It is important that healthcare practitioners observe stringent measures when administering drugs in order to avoid ligations associated with negligence and incompetence.   In fact, the law is very clear on the issues related to drug administration and in case Carlinville Area Hospital will fail to institute proper performance measures, it will be virtually impossible to avoid problems associated with poor drug administration. Instilling quality improvement in medication administration will ensure that Carlinville Area Hospital upholds all the stipulated guidelines, policies, and procedur es relating to nationwide drug administration. A number of methodologies are available to healthcare providers that can effectively be used to integrated quality improvement into performance measurements. The key methodologies include but not limited to Six Sigma, Lean Production System, and Root cause analysis. These methods are important to ensure that organization operations are streamlined enough to meet the performance measures instituted by the organizations.... ificant method of improving quality in a hospital setup, it involves formalized investigation, and problem solving approached aimed at uncovering what might have caused an event as well as the events that were intercepted. Root Cause Analysis plays a significant role in helping individuals pinpoint trends as well as assess risk to be applied in case of suspected human. RCA is often based on the assumption that systems rather than personal factors are probably the root cause of most problems (Hughes, 2008). Unlike other improvement methodologies, RCA is a reactive technique that starts to operate once an event has occurred, illustrating the sequence of events leading to the specified event and above all addressing the root causes for proper examination of the event. Notable advantages of Root Cause Analysis include highly significant in assessing reported errors. It can be used to suggest system changes whenever the need arises. Lean productions system has been utilized successful to integrate quality improvement and performance measures in number of organizations, healthcare not left behind. Lean production system has highly been used to remove inefficiencies in organization systems that may lead to wastes (Hughes, 2008). Customer needs are the focus of this method as it aims at removing activities considered non-value-added to improve processes. This methodology depends a lot on the root cause analysis in its effort to improve processes considering that RCA has the ability to investigate errors. Hughes (2008) asserts that Lean production method only comes in to improve quality and prevent future occurrence of identified errors through RCA. Lean production method is considered advantageous for producing results in an objective and concise manner. Additionally this