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M E D I C A T I O N
S A F E T Y
What's Wrong With These Pictures?
Don't let these 10 medication missteps happen at your
facility.
Sheldon S. Sones, RPh, FASCP | Newington, Conn.
Safe medication management is founded on proper drug handling, from storage to preparation to delivery. The rules of drug administration have been clearly established by regulatory agencies and professional organizations. They should inform your facility's best practices, as any breaches in them can impair patient safety. Take a look at the photos on the next few pages and see if you can determine what's gone wrong in each one. Then read on to see how the situation should be remedied. You might also want to review your staff's medication handling practices to make sure these types of errors aren't putting your patients at risk. OSM
Mr. Sones (shelsones@aol.com) is a pharmacy consultant and safe medication management officer at more than 130 ambulatory facilities in the Northeast.
What's wrong? Simple: This is not by any stretch of the imagination the right way to identify a syringe's contents.
The remedy: Use a properly completed syringe label, containing the information described above.
