Conclusion
Changes in medicines management, particularly
relating to administration, suggest the need to
consider not only the nurse’s role, but also a whole
system approach, including the context and setting
in which this task takes place. Nurses need to be
aware of the constraints and external influences that
could affect their ability to administer medicines.
It is not helpful to blame individual nurses for
medication errors. Instead, all factors, including
those that involve processes and the organisation,
should be considered in terms of how they could
have contributed to the error. Only when the true
cause of an error and all contributing factors have
been considered, can effective solutions be put in
place to reduce medicine-related error rates NS