DISCLOSURE IN HEALTHCARE
Basic Pharmacotherapeutic Concepts/Ethical and Legal Aspects of Prescribing
“As a nurse practitioner, you prescribe medications for your patients. You make an error when prescribing medication to a 5-year-old patient. Rather than dosing him appropriately, you prescribe a dose suitable for an adult.”
Write a 2- to 3-page paper that addresses the following:
- Explain the ethical and legal implications of the scenario you selected on all stakeholders involved, such as the prescriber, pharmacist, patient, and patient’s family.
- Describe strategies to address disclosure and nondisclosure as identified in the scenario you selected. Be sure to reference laws specific to your state.
- Explain two strategies that you, as an advanced practice nurse, would use to guide your decision making in this scenario, including whether you would disclose your error. Be sure to justify your explanation.
- Explain the process of writing prescriptions, including strategies to minimize medication errors.
Rosenthal, L. D., & Burchum, J. R. (2018). Lehne’s pharmacotherapeutics for advanced practice providers. St. Louis, MO: Elsevier.
- Chapter 1, “Prescriptive Authority” (pp. 1–3)
- Chapter 2, “Rational Drug Selection and Prescription Writing” (pp. 5–9)
- Chapter 3, “Promoting Positive Outcomes of Drug Therapy” (pp. 11–16)
- Chapter 4, “Pharmacokinetics, Pharmacodynamics, and Drug Interactions” (pp. 17–40)
- Chapter 5, “Adverse Drug Reactions and Medical Errors” (pp. 41–49)
- Chapter 6, “Individual Variation in Drug Response” (pp. 51–56)
American Geriatrics Society 2019 Beers Criteria Update Expert Panel. (2019). American Geriatrics Society 2019 updated AGS Beers criteria for potentially inappropriate medication use in older adults. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 67(4), 674–694. doi:10.1111/jgs.15767
American Geriatrics Society 2019 updated AGS Beers criteria for potentially inappropriate medication use in older adults by American Geriatrics Society, in Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, Vol. 67/Issue 4. Copyright 2019 by Blackwell Publishing. Reprinted by permission of Blackwell Publishing via the Copyright Clearance Center.
This article is an update to the Beers Criteria, which includes lists of potentially inappropriate medications to be avoided in older adults as well as newly added criteria that lists select drugs that should be avoided or have their dose adjusted based on the individual’s kidney function and select drug-drug interactions documented to be associated with harms in older adults.
Drug Enforcement Administration. (n.d.-a). Code of federal regulations. Retrieved February 1, 2019, from https://www.deadiversion.
usdoj.gov/21cfr/cfr/1300/…
This website outlines the code of federal regulations for prescription drugs.
Drug Enforcement Administration. (n.d.-b). Mid-level practitioners authorization by state. Retrieved May 13, 2019 from http://www.deadiversion.usdoj.
gov/drugreg/praction…
This website outlines the schedules for controlled substances, including prescriptive authority for each schedule.
Drug Enforcement Administration. (2006). Practitioner’s manual. Retrieved from http://www.deadiversion.usdoj.
gov/pubs/manuals/pra…
This manual is a resource for practitioners who prescribe, dispense, and administer controlled substances. It provides information on general requirements, security issues, recordkeeping, prescription requirements, and addiction treatment programs.
Drug Enforcement Administration. (n.d.-c). Registration. Retrieved February 1, 2019, from https://www.deadiversion.
usdoj.gov/drugreg/index.h…
This website details key aspects of drug registration.
This resource introduces the code of ethics for nurses and highlights critical aspects for ethical guideline development, interpretation, and application in practice.
Institute for Safe Medication Practices. (2017). List of error-prone abbreviations, symbols, and dose designations. Retrieved from https://www.ismp.org/
recommendations/error-prone-a. ..
This website provides a list of prescription-writing abbreviations that might lead to misinterpretation, as well as suggestions for preventing resulting errors.
This article provides NPs with information regarding state-based laws for NP prescribing.
Note all references within the last five years.
Answer preview
The nursing profession encompasses very delicate moral, ethical, and legal issues since even a minor error could have serious implications on the life of a patient. Patients expect medical practitioners to inform them whenever any procedure goes wrong, or a professional approves an inappropriate intervention. The difficulty of enforcing disclosure arises because practitioners could fear suffering career-defining repercussions. This paper uses a hypothetical scenario in which a child is given the wrong dosage to highlight what a….
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