Untenable Expectations: Nurses’ Work in the Context of Medication Administration, Error, and the Organization

We explored nurses’ work in the context of medication administration, errors, and the organization. Secondary analysis of ethnographic data included 92 hours of non-participant observation, and 37 unstructured interviews with nurses, administrators, and pharmacists. Think-aloud observations and analysis of institutional documents supplemented these data. Findings revealed the nature of nurses’ work was characterized by chasing a standard of care, prioritizing practice, and renegotiating routines. The rich description identified characteristics of nurses’ work as cyclical, chaotic and complex shattering studies that explained nurses’ work as linear. A new theoretical model was developed, illustrating the inseparability of nurses’ work from contextual contingencies and enhancing our understanding of the cascading components of work that result in days that spin out of the nurses’ control. These results deepen our understanding why present efforts targeting the reduction of medication errors may be ineffective and places administration accountable for the context in which medication errors occur.