Medication Errors – rheul comments

I really think you need more references. My master’s thesis had over 125 reference articles…so I think you need to beef it up. My guess is that you’ve read way more articles than you cite. Just go back and cite more!!! It will make your arguments much stronger.

I’m not sure if I work in a minority, but here in Columbus our hospital nurses have very strict procedures for when a medication error occurs. I got the feeling when reading your document that the general feeling is nurses don’t know what to do when a mistake happens, and I tend to disagree. They KNOW what to do. They may not LIKE it. I did a quick search at St Francis and we have multiple policies regarding medication errors.

I presume you are talking about medication errors in an inpatient setting. You may want to specify inpatient vs outpatient.

I think your study is going to be qualitative, descriptive study. From what I understand you’ll be interviewing nurses that administer medication as well as hospital administrators. But then I saw something about a questionnaire. I’m just confused what you’ll actually be doing. Is the questionnaire first and then the focus group? For both nurses and administration? Sorry.
Have you decided what questions you’ll be asking? How many questions?
Will they be the same or different for nurses vs administration?
As for administration, who exactly are you thinking? Hospital CEO? CNO? CMO? COO? CFO? They each play a vital, but very different role in the running of the hospital. Some have NO clinical experience whatsoever.
How many people is your ideal number to interview?
I’m not sure if this applies, but most research that involves hospitals or people in general have to go through an IRB (institutional review board). This protects the study participants. Is that something you know about and will have to do?
How will you take all the data and make conclusions? Even in qualitative studies, you have to have a plan to look at data and come up with some sort of conclusion.

Is Georgia important? You mention multiple times it will be done in GA…but now you’re moving. How is that going to affect your research?

So…in conclusion, I think you have a great start. Think about what question you want to answer and then the rest comes into focus. Let me know when you need me to read again.