Combining Quality Improvement and Staff Development Efforts to Decrease Patient-Controlled Analgesia Pump Errors

Abstract

In Brief Errors in programming patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) pumps unfortunately occur in hospitals. At this hospital, quality improvement efforts were combined with staff development programming to decrease PCA pump errors. A significant decrease in PCA pump errors was found after 1:1 staff education. The authors relate the staff development and quality improvement efforts that resulted in a signifi cant decrease in PCA Pump errors.