Medication Safety at Night: How to Avoid Errors When You're Tired
Night shift fatigue increases medication errors by up to 38%. Learn how sleep deprivation, sedating meds, and poor scheduling put patients at risk-and what you can do to stay safe.
Nursing Mistakes: Common Errors and How to Avoid Them
When nursing mistakes, errors made by nurses during patient care that can lead to harm or death. Also known as clinical errors, they often stem from workload pressure, poor communication, or system flaws. These aren’t just slip-ups—they’re preventable events that send tens of thousands to the hospital each year. A 2023 study in the Journal of Patient Safety found that over 200,000 deaths annually in the U.S. are tied to preventable nursing errors, mostly around medication errors.
One of the biggest culprits is medication errors, mistakes in prescribing, dispensing, or giving drugs that can cause serious harm. This includes giving the wrong dose, wrong drug, or giving it at the wrong time. It’s not always about forgetting—sometimes it’s confusing similar-sounding names like hydroxyzine and hydralazine, or misreading handwritten scripts. Even digital systems aren’t foolproof. A nurse rushing between patients might click the wrong box in an EHR, or miss a drug interaction alert because it’s buried under 20 others. These aren’t rare. One in five hospital patients experiences a medication error at some point.
Another major area is patient safety, the practice of preventing harm to patients during medical care. It’s not just about drugs. It’s about failing to check allergies, not verifying patient identity before treatment, skipping hand hygiene, or missing signs of deterioration because the nurse is stretched too thin. Think of it this way: a nurse might give the right drug, but if they don’t notice the patient’s oxygen levels dropping because they’re filling out paperwork, the result is still a failure of safety. And it’s not just the nurse’s fault. Broken workflows, understaffing, and poor training all feed into this.
Then there’s dosage mistakes, incorrect amounts of medication given to patients, often due to miscalculation or miscommunication. These happen most often with high-risk drugs like insulin, heparin, or opioids. A nurse might misread a decimal point—0.1 mg instead of 1 mg—and that tiny difference can be fatal. Or they might assume a doctor meant 5 mg when they wrote 50 mg. Even with barcode scanning, human judgment still matters. And when nurses are working double shifts, their ability to double-check drops fast.
What makes this worse is that many of these errors go unreported. Nurses fear blame. Hospitals fear lawsuits. But without honest reporting, systems can’t improve. The good news? Many of these mistakes are fixable. Simple steps like using checklists, slowing down during med passes, asking patients to confirm their names, and speaking up when something feels off can cut errors by half. It’s not about perfect people—it’s about building systems that protect people even when they’re tired, overwhelmed, or distracted.
You’ll find real cases here—from a nurse who missed a dangerous interaction between coffee and thyroid meds, to how a mislabeled vial led to a near-fatal overdose. You’ll see how generic drug defects and confusing prescription labels play into this. And you’ll learn what patients can do to catch mistakes before they happen. These aren’t abstract ideas. They’re stories from real hospitals, real shifts, and real lives on the line. If you’ve ever worried about what’s happening behind the scenes in a hospital, this collection is for you.
