Nurses and medication error: a discursive reading of the literature

Medication management is a part of everyday nursing practice. In carrying out this aspect of their role, nurses are subject to a range of practices and procedures, which are dictated through legal, management and medical requirements to ensure safe administration of medications. The literature addresses a range of areas related to the nurse's role in medication management, including knowledge required by nurses, practices and procedures related to administration, procedures for identifying and reducing errors and measuring error rates, and professional and ethical issues. The literature is a part of the discursive ensemble of nursing - as a written text it contributes to how nurses and colleagues construct and view nursing practice. This paper presents a discursive reading of that literature, exploring how nurses are positioned in relation to medication errors. I argue that the voice of nursing is mostly heard through discourses of biomedical science, law and management and draw on the work of Michel Foucault to illustrate some of the ways in which these discourses shape nursing practice.