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BENEFITS |
Reduce risk with a medication safety vest -
It's logical and easy
to use. |
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A
disposable alert vest/bib designed to minimize medication round interruptions
and distractions. Discard when the vest becomes soiled or contaminated.
Worn by staff during preparing and administering of
medications to their patients allowing nurses time to concentrate without
interruptions from colleagues, patients and visitors. |
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According to the
United States Pharmacopeia
(USP)
(2010) "techniques to decrease interruptions and distractions
include visual cues (such as wearing orange safety vests), physical
barriers (e.g., preparing doses in a medication room) and the use of
checklists that assist attention focus or refocus (38).
Medication safety zones should be located in areas where the potential
for distraction and interruption is minimized." |
Limits
interruptions minimizes errors, creating safer medication rounds and
additional time for patient care.*
Discarded after becoming soiled or contaminated.
Reduces the problems with having staff
members clean their own vest.
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*"Interruptions
to nurses contributed to a staggering 80.2 per cent medication error
rate, including clinical errors or procedural failures, according to
a study by the University of Sydney's Health Informatics Research and
Evaluation Unit published in the Archives of Internal Medicine today."
Without interruption, the estimated risk of a major error was just 2.3
%, but with 4 interruptions this risk doubled to 4.7 %"
University of Sydney 26 April 2010.
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Studies show the use
of medication interruption vests reduce the number of interruptions by
71% - 74%. Errors in administering medication cause about 400,000
preventable adverse evemts in hospitals and costs $3.5 billion in a
year, according to the Institute of Medicine.
Read more about medication error studies...
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In Emergency Departments interruptions led emergency department doctors
to spend less time on the tasks they were working on and, in nearly a
fifth of cases, to give up on the task altogether. Researchers, from the
University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales, also found
that each doctor was typically interrupted 6.6 times per hour; 11
percent of all tasks were interrupted, 3.3 percent of them more than
once. "Our results support the hypothesis that the highly interruptive
nature of busy clinical environments may have a negative impact on
patient safety," they said. |
