NursingResearch paperMedication safety

Medication administration breaches paper guide

A two to three page APA research paper with three scholarly references under five years old: describe what a culture and environment of safety should look like when preparing and administering medications, identify three to five common breaches with the factors that lead to them, and explain how each identified error and cause can be prevented.

Aug 12, 2026

Editorial process

Last reviewed · August 12, 2026

Written by

Aaron Bishop

MA, Education

assignment interpretation and research-methods coaching across disciplines

Reviewed by

Dr. Nathan Cole

PhD, Rhetoric & Composition

Argumentation and thesis development

On this page

Interpret the task
Assignment instructions
Deliverables
Proposed outline
Research plan
Reference shortlist
Final review

Why must the three questions form a chain?

The three questions form a chain and the paper only works if you hold the chain together. Question one sets the standard, question two identifies where practice falls short of it, and question three closes the gap — so the breaches you name in section two should be failures of the culture you described in section one, and the preventions in section three should map one to one onto those breaches. The worked examples the instructor supplies show exactly this: distraction during preparation is the cause, wrong dose is the breach, and the prevention addresses distraction rather than exhorting nurses to be careful. Build a table for yourself before writing — breach, contributing factor, prevention — and the paper writes itself in the right order. Papers that answer the three questions independently produce preventions that address errors they never identified, which is the single clearest sign to a marker that the sections were written on different days.

The culture question is the one most often answered with adjectives, and adjectives are the cheapest thing in a safety paper. A culture of safety is not a caring or vigilant environment; it is a set of observable conditions. Say what you would actually see: staff reporting near misses without fear of punishment, a just culture that distinguishes human error from at-risk behaviour from recklessness, protected medication preparation zones with no-interruption conventions, independent double checks for high-alert drugs, barcode scanning available and used, adequate staffing and lighting, and leadership that responds to reports visibly enough that people keep making them. Each of those is checkable by walking onto a unit and looking, which is what makes the section markable and what separates a description of culture from a wish for one. If you have worked somewhere that had some of these and not others, the contrast is worth one sentence.

For the three to five breaches, be precise about terminology, since wrong dose, wrong drug, wrong route, wrong time, wrong patient, omission and documentation failure are distinct categories with different causes. Attach the contributing factor to each: interruption, look-alike or sound-alike names, unlabelled syringes, verbal orders, workaround of the scanner, fatigue and shift length, unfamiliar agency staff, or a poorly designed order set. Then match each prevention to its cause, and prefer system fixes over individual ones because the evidence base does — education alone is the weakest intervention and constraints designed into the process are the strongest. Watch the mechanics too: no more than three pages excluding title and reference pages, three scholarly references five years old or less, every claim and paraphrase cited, and a Grammarly report scoring 78 to 100 with plagiarism under 15 per cent submitted alongside the paper as a separate deliverable.

Likely learning objectives

Inferred from the brief — check these against your own rubric.

01
Map preventions one to one onto the breaches you identified.
02
Describe a safety culture as observable conditions rather than attitudes.
03
Use the standard error categories precisely.
04
Attach a contributing factor to every breach named.
05
Prefer system-level interventions over education alone.

Assignment instructionsQuoted verbatim

Read the full question

Review every instruction before using the planning guidance that follows.

This assignment is a research paper, therefore it is required that student use the APA template. Paper must include both a title page and reference page. Use APA Editorial Format for all citations and references used. Three (3) scholarly references are required for this paper. Reference must be 5 years old or less. Review the attachment “Determine if a Source is Scholarly” Review the attachment “How to Know When to Cite a Source” Review APA guidelines under the Resource tab found in the upper left hand side of Blackboard Attachments which can be found at the top of this page Student will submit a detailed report from Grammarly as well as their 2- 3 page paper. Grammarly instructions can be found as an attachment at the top of this page. Grammarly requirements include: Score of 78 – 100%; Plagiarism less than 15%. Provide your answers to the following questions in a 2- 3 page paper (NO MORE THAN 3 PAGES; title page and reference page are not counted as pages): What should the culture and environment of safety look like when preparing and administering medications? Support all claims with scholarly sources. All claims and paraphrased work needs to be cited. Identify 3 -5 common breaches of medication administration and what factors lead to those breaches. Support all claims with scholarly sources. All claims and paraphrased work needs to be cited. An example of a common breach and cause: A common error when administering medications is administering the wrong dose of a medication to a client (McCuistion et. al. 2018; Cloete, 2015). According to Cloete (2015), nurses’ often prepare medications around several distractions. Preparing medications with distractions such as noise and interruptions can lead to collecting an incorrect dose and administering it to a client, thus causing a medication error (Cloete, 2015). How can the identified medication errors and causes be prevented? Support all claims with scholarly sources. All claims and paraphrased work needs to be cited. An example of prevention: Distraction is identified as a common cause of medication errors when administering medications to patients (McCuistion et. al., 2018; Cloete, 2015). In Cloete’s (2015) review of how to reduce medications errors Cloete found that by developing a quiet zone, an area where nurses can collect medications without distractions, will decrease the chances of a nurse administering the wrong dose to their client. Reflect on all the information you discovered and come up with a plan to preventing medication errors utilizing your findings. Your plan should reflect the information you researched. (Do NOT use 1st person; use the “the author of this paper” if needed.) Example of a reflection: Distraction is considered a major cause of common medication errors, therefore it’s important for nurses to prepare medications in a quiet area (McCuistion et. al., 2018; Cloete, 2015). The author of this paper will prepare all medications at or in a medication room where distractions are limited. This room and/or area will be quiet and provide limited interruptions.

Turn the brief into deliverables

01
A 2-3 page APA paper with title and reference pages.
02
A description of the culture and environment of safety for medication administration.
03
Three to five common breaches with their contributing factors.
04
Preventions matched to each identified error and cause.
05
Three scholarly references published within five years.
06
A Grammarly report meeting the stated score and plagiarism thresholds.

What does a safety culture look like concretely?

Culture and environment of safety

Reporting without fear, just culture, protected preparation zones, independent double checks, barcode scanning, staffing and visible leadership response.

Common breaches

Three to five, named using the standard categories rather than described loosely.

Contributing factors

Interruption, look-alike names, verbal orders, scanner workarounds, fatigue, unfamiliar staff, poor order design.

Prevention

Interventions matched to each cause, weighted toward constraints and process design rather than education.

Which preventions does the evidence favour?

Recommended databases

NCBI Bookshelf
World Health Organization
CINAHL or PubMed

Search sequence

1.
Build the breach-factor-prevention table before writing any prose.
2.
Search for each breach category by name rather than for medication errors generally.
3.
Apply the five-year filter in the database, since it is an explicit requirement.
4.
Run the Grammarly check early enough to fix what it finds rather than the night before.

Reference shortlist

These are authoritative starting points, not a ready-made bibliography. A qualified reviewer must confirm that each source fits the assignment and supports the claim beside which it is cited.

Nothing here is cleared for citation until you have read it.

01
Medication Administration Safety
Patient Safety and Quality, NCBI Bookshelf · 2008
The error categories and the systems view of causation — useful for structure, though check the recency rule before citing it as one of your three.
02
Medication Dispensing Errors and Prevention
StatPearls, NCBI Bookshelf · 2023
Contributing factors and prevention strategies, including look-alike names and interruption.
03
Medication Without Harm
World Health Organization · 2024
The global patient safety challenge framing, with priority areas that map onto the prevention section.
04
Patient safety
World Health Organization · 2024
Burden figures for medication-related harm, for the paper's opening justification.

Review before submission

Common mistakes

Answering the three questions as unrelated sections.
Describing safety culture with adjectives instead of observable conditions.
Blurring the standard error categories together.
Naming breaches with no contributing factor attached.
Proposing 'more education' as the main prevention.
Exceeding three pages, which the instructions explicitly cap.
Using references older than five years or non-scholarly sources.
Forgetting the Grammarly report, which is a separate deliverable.

Submission checklist

A breach-factor-prevention structure visible in the headings.
At least five observable features of a safety culture.
Three to five breaches, using standard category names.
A named contributing factor for each.
A prevention for each, at system level where possible.
Every claim and paraphrase cited.
Three scholarly references under five years old.
No more than three pages, plus the Grammarly report.

Use this guide to plan and review your own work. Follow your institution's rules and read our academic-integrity policy.