Nurses' practice environments, error interception practices, and inpatient medication errors.

Area of Science:

• Nursing Practice Environment
• Patient Safety
• Medication Errors

Background:

• Medication errors pose a significant risk to patient safety in healthcare settings.
• Understanding factors influencing medication errors is crucial for developing effective interventions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the relationship between nursing practice environment characteristics, nurse staffing, and nurses' error interception practices.
• To determine the impact of these factors on the rates of nonintercepted medication errors in acute care hospitals.

Main Methods:

• A nonexperimental design was employed, surveying 686 registered nurses across 82 medical-surgical units in 14 U.S. hospitals.
• Data included medication error rates, nurse staffing levels (RN hours per patient day), and nursing practice environment characteristics (using the Practice Environment Scale of the Nursing Work Index).
• A novel metric assessed nurses' error interception practices, with all measures aggregated to the unit level for hierarchical linear modeling.

Main Results:

• A supportive nursing practice environment was positively associated with nurses' error interception practices.
• Nurses' error interception practices demonstrated an inverse relationship with medication error rates, indicating fewer errors when nurses effectively intercept them.

Conclusions:

• A supportive practice environment empowers nurses to enhance their error interception capabilities.
• Effective nurse-led error interception is a key strategy for reducing medication errors and improving patient safety.