Development of a Nursing Practice Guidelines for High Alert Drugs Administration, Samut-Sakhon hospital

Abstract

                       This research and development study design aimed to develop the nursing practice guidelines and study results of the nursing practice guidelines for high alert drugs administration, Samut-Sakhon Hospital. The process consisted of 4 steps: 1) situation analysis 2) practice development 3) implementation and 4) evaluation. The samples were purposive selected and consisted of 111 registered nurses and 502 patients who were admitted and received high alert drugs during January - February 2020. The research instrument was the high alert drugs nursing practice guidelines and its content validity was confirmed by 3 experts. Data were collected using the nursing practice guidelines for high alert drugs administration, the knowledge test on high alert drugs administration, the assessment form on compliance of high alert drugs nursing practice guidelines and monitoring-surveillance form on high alert drugs administration. The instrument was tested for content validity and its index equal 1.0

                    The results revealed 3 characteristics of the nursing practice guidelines for high alert drugs administration at Samut-Sakhon Hospital: 1) nursing practice before administering high alert drugs 2) nursing practice during administering high alert drugs 3) nursing practice after administering high alert drugs. Application of the nursing practice guidelines for high-risk drug administration of the registered nurses revealed that the knowledge score of the nurses after using the guidelines was significantly higher than before using the guidelines (p<.01). In addition, compliance of high alert drugs nursing practice guidelines was at the highest level. The overall nursing practice was also at the highest level. The incident of 8 medication errors was found; however the patients did not experience any adverse reactions.