Nurses are responsible for ensuring safety and quality of patient
care at all times. Many nursing tasks involve a degree of risk,
and medication administration arguably carries the greatest
risk. Unfortunately, patients are frequently harmed or injured by
medication errors. Some suffer permanent disability and for others
the errors are fatal. Nurses have traditionally followed the five rights
of medication administration (patient, drug, route, time, dose) to
help prevent errors, and more recently, the seven rights (including
documentation and reason). This article identifies nine rights of
medication administration.