Visual differentiation in look-alike medication names
Author | : |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : 0 |
Release | : 2012 |
ISBN-10 | : OCLC:1374554138 |
ISBN-13 | : |
Rating | : 4/5 (38 Downloads) |
Book excerpt: The mixed results with the alternatives to tall man lettering suggest more investigation is required to understand how the method of differentiation, the display medium, the profession of participants and their workplace activities, the complexity of the task, reading strategies, and environmental stressors such as interruptions affect the recognition and selection of look-alike medications. [...] As early as 1949, the similarity in the name, along with the colour of the solution and the shape and weight of the ampoule have been associated with medication errors (Lancet). [...] This allowed us to make of improvements to the design of the experimental material and the protocol, including adjusting the exposure times of names to and adding and adjusting appropriate distractors. [...] Each of the name pairs were set with the following typographic treatments: • all lowercase letters; • tall man letters in a portion of the name; • bold letters in a portion of the name; • a black rectangle and white letters in a portion of the name; and in addition, a content-based treatment was evaluated with: • both the generic and brand names (this was evaluated against the lowercase. [...] Time to select the name and accuracy were recorded from the time they turned to the distractor sentence page in the experiment booklet until the time they dropped the medication in a basket, positioned close to the MAR (Figure 3).