Alison Merchant

Macquarie University · Australian Institute of Health Innovation

Parents and carers play a critical role in supporting their children while in hospital. Multiple qualitative studies have explored parental involvement in the care of hospitalised children. Administration of medication to young children can be difficult and cause anxiety and stress for children. Parents are often willing and able to assist, yet lit...

Objectives Technology-related prescribing errors curtail the positive impacts of computerised provider order entry (CPOE) on medication safety. Understanding how technology-related errors (TREs) occur can inform CPOE optimisation. Previously, we developed a classification of the underlying mechanisms of TREs using prescribing error data from two ad...

Objectives: To examine changes in technology-related errors (TREs), their manifestations and underlying mechanisms at 3 time points after the implementation of computerized provider order entry (CPOE) in an electronic health record; and evaluate the clinical decision support (CDS) available to mitigate the TREs at 5-years post-CPOE. Materials and...

Objectives Technology-related prescribing errors curtail the positive impacts of computerised provider order entry (CPOE) on medication safety. Understanding how technology-related errors occur can inform CPOE optimisation. Previously, we developed a classification of the underlying mechanisms of technology-related errors using prescribing error da...

Objectives To compare medication errors identified at audit and via direct observation with medication errors reported to an incident reporting system at paediatric hospitals and to investigate differences in types and severity of errors detected and reported by staff. Methods This is a comparison study at two tertiary referral paediatric hospital...

Aims The potential harm associated with medication errors is widely reported, but data on actual harm are limited. When actual harm has been measured, assessment processes are often poorly described, limiting their ability to be reproduced by other studies. Our aim was to design and implement a new process to assess actual harm resulting from medic...

Limited evidence exists regarding medication administration errors (MAEs) on general paediatric wards or associated risk factors exists. The aim of this study was to identify nurse, medication, and work-environment factors associated with MAEs among paediatric inpatients. This was a prospective, direct observational study of 298 nurses in a paediat...

Electronic medication systems (EMS) improve medication safety in hospitals; however require modifications to optimize their performance. Drawing on a five-year program of research, we developed the Health Innovation Series to disseminate recommendations arising from our research to a wide audience. Each issue contains EMS optimization tips that can...

Medication prescribing in paediatrics is complex and compounded by the need to provide age and weight related doses, and errors continue to be problematic. Electronic medication systems (EMS) can reduce errors through dosing calculators and computerised decision support. However, evidence on costs and benefits of these systems is limited, particula...

Electronic medication management (eMM) systems are designed to improve safety, but there is little evidence of their effectiveness in paediatrics. This study assesses the short-term (first 70 days of eMM use) and long-term (one-year) effectiveness of an eMM system to reduce prescribing errors, and their potential and actual harm. We use a stepped-w...

Objectives: To assess the immediate (first 70 days of use) and long-term (one-year) effectiveness of an electronic medication management (eMM) system to reduce prescribing errors, and their potential and actual harm in paediatrics. Design: A stepped-wedge cluster randomised controlled trial (SWCRCT) over 11 weeks (April–July 2016): 8 clusters rando...

The airways of people with cystic fibrosis (CF) are chronically colonised with different pathogens. With recent interest in methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), we have recently examined the rates of MRSA colonisation in different groups within our CF Service. This paper now examines the effectiveness of eradication strategies to cle...