The selection of a representative group from the population of interest is among the prerequisites for the production of reliable and generalizable results. To explore medication errors in inpatient psychiatric settings from the provider’s perspective, it is essential to organize the sampling process carefully. This paper seeks to discuss the issue with reference to applicable professional groups, barriers to sampling and targeting, and the suitable data collection strategy.
Researchable Populations in the Field
In the mental healthcare field, there is a range of researchable populations whose participation could support the identification of factors contributing to medication errors linked with the incorrect identification of patients, dosage decisions, administration routes, and so on. Addressing the research problem selected for the previous week’s discussion requires communication with professionals involved in the care of adult inpatients with psychiatric diagnoses. Among such professional groups are psychiatrists that have the authority to prescribe psychotropic medications, psychiatric pharmacists that participate in the provision of pharmacy inpatient services, and psychiatric nurses without APRN degrees.
The Most Appropriate Population for the Study
Psychiatric nurses that are not involved in diagnostic tasks but are responsible for administering medications are the most appropriate group. Firstly, current research suggests that mistakes in psychiatric hospitals are the most frequent at the administration stage. Incidents occurring during drug administration account for more than 80% of all errors, so care providers involved in this process should be the most relevant population (Mehrabifar et al., 2017). Secondly, despite modern incident reporting systems’ existence, hospitals’ administrative staff and other members of psychiatric teams are unlikely to be fully informed about incidents and potential contributors to errors. The fear of legal action and implications for one’s career prospects is what nurses in mental health and non-psychiatric facilities have in common (Keers et al., 2018). Experiments with hypothetical error scenarios suggest that non-severe mistakes, such as minor dose delays, get reported only in up to 30% of instances (Keers et al., 2018; Lee, 2017). Considering these connections between one’s clinical role and the degree of informedness about incidents and barriers to correct drug administration, obtaining a sample from the population of psychiatric nurses in psychiatric inpatient facilities is a viable option.
Potential Challenges
The plan to recruit a few dozens of psychiatric nurses from local mental health hospitals or psychiatric wards in general hospitals could be affected by a series of obstacles. To start with, the researcher’s access to information that healthcare organizations might find sensitive and shedding light on their internal weaknesses would be critical, which would create ethical challenges. The fear of reputational losses might motivate hospital managers to discourage care staff from participation or give instructions to eligible participants regarding the desirable answers. Additionally, due to several factors, ranging from an inadequate work-life balance to the anticipation of troubles and investigation following their responses, nurses may decline the offer to participate in research or provide dishonest answers (Luck et al., 2017). These barriers could decrease response rates in studies in nursing populations to a large extent.
Strategies to Address Potential Challenges
Several strategies could reduce these barriers’ impact on the population’s accessibility and willingness to participate. There are measures to eliminate the risks of participant identification and maximize enrolled respondents’ anonymity and confidentiality. The most critical strategy is the absence of questions covering personally identifiable information, such as the respondent’s name, physical address, contact details, and so on. Additionally, e-mail letters with the participation offer will be sent to a few hospitals in the area, but participants will not have to identify their employer in the survey, which will reduce the reputation-related concerns for psychiatric facilities. Finally, the required time investments may also affect care professionals’ determination to complete their response attempts, which is why surveys should ideally take less than fifteen minutes (Luck et al., 2017). These strategies could be mentioned and explained in the research participation offer to support nurses’ motivation to contribute to the common goal.
Choosing the Approach to Data Collection
The optimal approach to data collection would include researching local psychiatric hospitals, contacting their representatives, asking the latter to make the link to an anonymous survey accessible through the hospital’s employee portal, and accepting responses from nurses. The rationale refers to the ease of quantifying electronically collected data, protected confidentiality, and the prevention of duplicate responses or contributions from non-eligible populations, including non-practicing or retired nurses, care providers in non-psychiatric facilities, or anonymous users with unknown occupations. Dr. Potthoff (n.d.) advocates for using data collection strategies that would allow capturing data in an electronic format, thus supporting clarity. The use of software for anonymous online surveys, such as SurveyMonkey, would support this requirement while also promoting IP tracking to eliminate duplicated responses. Next, well-organized data collection activities often lead to research hypotheses’ restructuring (Shi, n.d.). Unlike surveys or interviews conducted in person, anonymous data collection tools would encourage more honest and comprehensive answers, thus supporting the refinement of the initial hypothesis. Finally, making the survey link available only for nurses currently employed by psychiatric hospitals would guarantee each response’s relevance to the study.
Conclusion
To sum up, recruiting enough psychiatric nurses would be required for the exploration of nurse-perceived risk factors for medication administration errors. This, however, could be challenging due to nurses’ and employers’ fears of reputational losses. An anonymous online survey available for practicing nurses could promote effective data collection and lay the foundation for novel medication error elimination strategies at the nurse level for mental healthcare facilities.
References
Keers, R. N., Plácido, M., Bennett, K., Clayton, K., Brown, P., & Ashcroft, D. M. (2018). What causes medication administration errors in a mental health hospital? A qualitative study with nursing staff.PloS One, 13(10), 1-18. Web.
Lee, E. (2017). Reporting of medication administration errors by nurses in South Korean hospitals. International Journal for Quality in Health Care, 29(5), 728-734. Web.
Luck, L., Chok, H. N., & Wilkes, L. (2017). Nurses as participants in research: An evaluation of recruitment techniques.Nurse Researcher, 25(2), 44-48. Web.
Mehrabifar, A., Mansouri, A., Gholami, K., Ghaeli, P., & Javadi, M. (2017). Investigation of medication errors in a teaching psychiatric hospital using chart reviews.Medbiotech Journal, 1(2), 57-61. Web.
Potthoff, S. (n.d.). Quantitative research: Sampling.
Shi, L. (n.d.). Selecting a research topic and developing a hypothesis.