Poster Presentation
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
9:45 AM - 11:00 AM
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
1:00 PM - 2:15 PM
Patient Safety: An Evidence-Based Project to Improve Medication Allergy and Adverse Drug Reaction Reporting
Sharon M. Valente, PhD, APRN, BC, Nursing, Department of Veterans Affairs, Los Angeles, CA, USA
| Learning Objective #1: Describe an evidence based project to improve patient safety. |
| Learning Objective #2: Identify the steps of design and evaluation of EBP project. |
Medicine-related illnesses annually cost over $75 billion. Adverse drug reactions (ADR) are the 4-6th leading cause of death in the U.S. An educational campaign to reduce ADR and improve documentation included: (1) Allergy Awareness Campaign; (2) Staff Nurse Training on documentation of allergies/ADRs; and (3) Patient Oriented Brochures to encourage allergy reporting and ADRs; and (4) Fact Sheet about ADRs. As a result, the documentation of medication allergies and Adverse drug reactions improved significantly. Accurate reporting of allergies and adverse drug reactions is essential to patient safety [1]. In this project, a group of nurses partnered with informatics and pharmacy to develop an evidence-based project to improve nurses’ reporting and recording of medication allergies and adverse drug reactions (ADR) and to improve patient reports of their drug allergies and reactions. An adverse drug reaction is an unintended, undesirable or unexpected effect of prescribed medication or of medication errors that require the medication be discontinued or the dose modified, require initial or prolonged hospitalization; result in disability; require treatment with a prescription or have other untoward effects. An adverse drug event indicates that a patient injury due to a medication occurred either because of a reaction to the normal dose or due to an ADR that was preventable or resulted from an error [3]. The concept of ADR includes all responses to medications that place patients at risk or expose them to harm. At the tip of the iceberg are the approximately 770,000 Americans who are hospitalized and suffer ADRs which cost hospitals over $5.6 billion yearly. While many thousands of deaths may occur from medication errors, the accurate number of ADR caused deaths is not known [3]. In 2006, The Institute of Medicine estimated that 1.5 million of these ADR in the United States could be prevented.