Every day, there is a constant trust placed in many different people in the nursing profession: the decision of what will help patients in terms of medicine and the trust necessary to make those decisions. A wrong act or slight medication misdiagnosis in a patient could be the biggest factor in determining whether the patient lives or dies. Nurses in hospitals across the country are spread out, increasing the likelihood of errors. If a drug dose is off by even one decimal place, a patient can die. So the only real answer is for nurses to not be afraid to ask for help, always follow procedure and express their opinion if they feel something is wrong. First, every year there is a problem. Many deaths are associated with medical errors. Sarah Loughran writes: “In the United States, on average, 195,000 people died from potentially preventable hospital medical errors in each of the years 2000, 2001, and 2002…” (medicalnewstoday.com) and that was just in 2000, 2001, and 2002, with numbers increasing or decreasing each year; Nonetheless, there seems to be no end in sight for errors in the medical field. There is a way to significantly reduce these numbers. The way to do this is to level the ratio of doctors to nurses in hospitals, thereby removing the stressors of most nurses who often have to care for multiple patients alone but without any help to do so. While the demand for nurses may be high, there also comes a breaking point for any human being, "...factors such as high patient acuity, inadequate nurse-to-patient ratios, increased work demands, and decreased resources. » (AmericanJournal of Critical Care, 503.) The main causes of most errors among stress and interruptions are other factors such as: wrong dosage, missed dose...... in the middle of a paper...... work in hospitals all across the country, and hiring confident employees to these positions will have a big impact on the quality of treatment of people in medical institutions. Every nurse must follow procedure and focus on their job: healing people. Works Cited JB McKenzie, et al. “STRATEGIES USED BY CRITICAL CARE NURSES TO IDENTIFY, INTERRUPT AND CORRECT MEDICAL ERRORS.” American Journal of Critical Care 19.6 (2010): 500-509. CINAHL Plus with full text. EBSCO. Internet. March 7, 2011. Loughran, Sarah. “Hospital deaths due to medical errors at 195,000 per year in the United States.” Medicalnewstoday.com. Medical News Today, August 9, 2004. Web. March 7, 2011. Agyemang, REO and A While. “Medication errors: types, causes and impact on nursing practice.” British Journal of Nursing (BJN) 19.6 (2010): 380-385. CINAHL Plus with full text. EBSCO. Internet. March 7. 2011.