Implementing a Distraction-Free Practice With the Red Zone Medication Safety Initiative.

Background: The incidence of medication errors remains a continued concern across the spectrum of health care. Approaches to averting medication errors and implementing a culture of safety are key areas of focus for most institutions. We describe our experience of implementing a distraction-free medication safety practice across a large free-standing children's hospital.

Electronic medication reconciliation and medication errors.

Objective: To measure the impact of electronic medication reconciliation implementation on reports of admission medication reconciliation errors (MREs).

Design: Quality improvement project with time-series design.

Setting: A large, urban, tertiary care children's hospital.

Utility of a dedicated pediatric cardiac anticoagulation program: the Boston Children's Hospital experience.

Congenital heart disease is the leading cause of stroke in children. Warfarin therapy can be difficult to manage safely in this population because of its narrow therapeutic index, multiple drug and dietary interactions, small patient size, high-risk cardiac indications, and lack of data to support anticoagulation recommendations. We sought to describe our institution's effort to develop a dedicated cardiac anticoagulation service to address the special needs of this population and to review the literature.

Interventions to reduce medication prescribing errors in a paediatric cardiac intensive care unit.

Objective: To identify and reduce medication-prescribing errors by introducing systematic physician education and post-cardiac surgery admission prescription forms.

Design: Errors were defined as: incomplete prescriptions; potential adverse drug events (ADEs), i.e.

Initial experience with fenoldopam after cardiac surgery in neonates with an insufficient response to conventional diuretics.

Objective: Fenoldopam, a selective dopamine-1 receptor agonist, causes systemic vasodilation and increased renal blood flow and tubular sodium excretion. We hypothesized that urine output would improve when fenoldopam was added to conventional diuretic therapy after neonatal cardiopulmonary bypass.

Design: Retrospective cohort study using a time-series design.