Impact of nurse’s worked hours on medication administration near-miss error alerts

ABSTRACT

Long working hours have been shown to negatively impact adverse events in health care. In this study, a retrospective correlational design was used to evaluate the relationship between working hours and near-miss medication error alerts. During a two-year period, 5372 nurses triggered 420,706 near-miss alerts on 9, 285, 786 medication administrations. Nurses who worked 60 h or more in a week yielded an average near-miss rate of 4.0% compared to 3.0% (p <.001) for nurses who did not. Nurses working extended hours had a significantly increased risk of triggering a near-miss alert compared to those not working extended hours.

KEYWORDS:

• Nurse fatigue
• medication errors
• hours worked
• shift work
• overtime

Declaration of interest statement

The authors report no conflict of interest

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.