By Kim Smiley
A new study found that nearly a third of diabetic hospital patients experienced a medication error in a one week period. The study examined bedside data for 12,800 patients and 6,600 patient questionnaires for hospitals in England and Wales. Medication errors when treating diabetics can have severe consequences because many diabetics require medication to maintain healthy blood sugar levels. Blood sugar levels that are either too high or too low can result in significant illness and even death if untreated.
The two most common errors found by the study were failing to properly adjust medication when a patient’s blood sugar level was high (23.9%) and failing to sign off on the patient’s bedside information chart when insulin was given (11.1%).
This issue can be examined by building a Cause Map, an intuitive, visual root cause analysis format. The first step to building a Cause Map is to determine the impact to the overall organizational goals. In this example, the risk to diabetic patients is an impact to the safety goal. The next step is to ask “why” questions and add the cause boxes to the Cause Map to illustrate the cause and effect relationships between all the factors that contributed to the issue.
In this example, the risk to the diabetic patients occurred because medication errors occurred and the patients required medication to maintain healthy blood sugar levels. The study did not provide details on why the medication errors were made by hospital staff, but that information could be added to the Cause Map if it becomes known. A Cause Map can be still be useful when only a high level map can be built because it can help identify an at risk population and a common problem, the diabetic patients and the medication errors, which could help identify where more research is needed or where resources could be directed. To view a high level Cause Map of this issue, click on “Download PDF” above.
A potential solution that has been suggested for this problem is to improve training for hospital staff on how to properly treat diabetic patients. A more detailed look at understanding exactly why the staff is making errors could help direct the training plan to the most needed areas.