Medical Mistakes, Medication Errors Increase When Nurses Interrupted: Study

Researchers have found that distracted nurses are more prone to make medical mistakes and prescription errors, supporting arguments that having more nurses on staff, able to focus their attention on fewer tasks, could increase patient safety and reduce the risk of medical malpractice. 

The study was published in the April 26 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine and was conducted by researchers in Australia. The findings not only suggest the benefit of high nurse staffing levels, but also serve as a warning to family members and friends not to disturb nurses while visiting hospital patients.

Researchers performed an observational study of nurses at six wards in two major teaching hospitals in Sydney, Australia. They observed 98 nurses administering 4,271 medications to 720 patients from September 2006 through March 2008.

The findings indicate that each time a nurse was interrupted; it increased the chance of a procedural failure by 12.1%, and the chances of a clinical error by 12.7%. Researchers said that the association between interruptions and errors were directly correlated and independent of medical facility where the interruption occurred. The more distractions there were the more mistakes the nurses made.

Researchers said they were surprised by the number of medication mistakes being made by nurses, with or without distractions, only about 20% of medication administrations were both procedurally and clinically free of errors.

“Our data confirm conclusions from a review published recently by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality that the rate of medication administration errors is ‘truly staggering,’” researchers said. “Our results elevate the importance of interruptions as a contributor to medication errors in hospitals and provide a direction for prevention strategies and further research.”

Overall, most of the medication errors were found to be insignificant. However, 2.7% of the medication errors made by distracted nurses were rated as major mistakes.

Not checking the patient’s identification to make sure that they had the right medical chart was the most common procedural failure, which occurred frequently, regardless of distractions. Giving medications at the wrong time was the most frequent clinical mistake, followed administering IVs at the wrong rate.