Safe medication practice

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High-alert medications
High-alert medications refer to the category of drugs that have a high risk of causing a substantial patient harm, when they are used wrongly or against prescription. It is worth noting that though the occurrence of mistakes in these medications is rare, the consequences of blunder occurrence are likely to be more distressing to the patients (Belknap, pg. 339). Therefore, it is important for all physicians to analyze different categories of drugs to determine a group of medications that need special safeguarding to decrease the risk of mistakes occurrence.
Several strategies in many health sectors have been put into place to reduce the risk of errors when dealing with high- alert medications. These include; increasing access to the relevant information regarding these drugs. This is done through training in seminars and publication of booklets that contain information that gives guidelines on proper use of the respective drugs. Moreover, restricting the unnecessary access strategy is used. This is only possible through safe storage of the drugs. Finally, the use of auxiliary labels helps to reduce chances of using the wrong medications in patient’s treatments.
Though several strategies have been devised to reduce errors occurrence when dealing with high-alert medications, the approaches have failed due to the fact that many participants who deal with the medications fail to receive relevant training during the induction period.

Moreover, lack of knowledge and education deficiency on the high-alert medications has contributed to the increase in errors occurrences. On the other hand, the implementation of these strategies consumes huge amounts of the organization income hence the lack of finance limits the strategies implementation.
In conclusion, the use of high-alert medications in health sectors requires high degrees of proficiency and caretaking to reduce chances of error occurrence. The available strategies need to be evaluated periodically to determine their effectiveness in risk reduction. The outcomes of the evaluations should be shared repeatedly and possible changes made on the existing strategies.
Work Cited
Belknap, Steven. “High-alert’medications and patient safety.” Int J Qual Health Care 13.4 (2001): 339.