Conectar
To describe the challenges related to the flow of medication information in home care, their contributing factors, and home care registered nurses' and nurse leaders' views on preventing them.
A descriptive qualitative study.
Six group and one individual semi-structured interview were conducted remotely with 15 home care registered nurses and nurse leaders between 12 February 2023 and 9 November 2023 in Finland. The data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis.
We identified four main themes related to the challenges of medication information flow: the complexity of home care work in cooperation and the medication process, technology-related challenges, the healthcare professionals' individual factors and client-related challenges. These factors contributed to the challenges: the lack of healthcare professionals' resources, the healthcare professionals' attitudes to work and individual characteristics, the lack of healthcare professionals' uniform practices and client-related factors. Preventing challenges and incidents: strengthening standard healthcare practices, increasing healthcare resources, improving the individual factors of healthcare professionals, and guiding the client in the management of medication.
The medication information flow can be improved by discussing standard practices for the flow of medication information in home care and between home care and hospital teams.
It is crucial to identify challenges, contributing factors and prevention in the medication information flow from the home care registered nurses' and nurse leaders' perspective. These elements play an important role in developing medication information flow by collaborating extensively with other healthcare providers, clients, and relatives.
Healthcare professionals, nurse leaders, and educators can utilise this study's findings to develop the flow of medication information within and between organisations.
The Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research checklist was used.
No patient or public contribution.
To describe the contributing factors and types of reported medication incidents in home care related to the flow of information in different phases of the medication process, as reported by multi-professional healthcare groups.
This descriptive, qualitative study used retrospective data.
An incident-reporting database was used to collect 14,289 incident reports from 2017 to 2019 in a city in Finland. We used this data to select medication incidents (n = 1027) related to the flow of information in home care and between home care and hospitals. Data were divided into five groups based on the medication phase: (1) prescribing, (2) dispensing, (3) administration, (4) documentation and (5) self-administration. In addition, the types of medication-related incidents were described. The data were examined using abductive content analysis. The EQUATOR SRQR checklist was used in this report.
Four main categories were identified from the data: (1) issues related to information management, (2) cooperation issues between different actors, (3) work environment and lack of resources and (4) factors related to healthcare workers. Cooperation issues contributed to medication-related incidents during each phase. Incomplete communication was a contributing factor to medication incidents. This occurred between home care, remote care, hospital, the client and the client's relatives. Specifically, a lack of information-sharing occurred in repatriation situations, where care transitioned between different healthcare professionals.
Healthcare professionals, organisations, clients and their relatives should focus on the efficient and safe acquisition of medications. Specifically, the use of electronic communication systems, together with oral reports and checklists for discharge situations, and timely cooperation with pharmacists should be developed to manage information flows.
These findings demonstrate that healthcare professionals require uniform models and strategies to accurately and safely prescribe, dispense and administer medications in home care settings.
No patient or public contributions.
FreshRSS 