Redesigning medication labels for intravenous medication bags could help prevent medication errors from happening in the operating room, according to a study in the Journal of Patient Safety.
For the study, researchers examined if a redesigned IV bag label could reduce the risk of giving the wrong medication to a patient during an OR emergency. A group of 96 anesthesia trainees were put through a simulation in the OR using either the standard or redesigned IV bags.
Standard labels are printed on one side of the clear IV bags, with small text and a cluttered appearance, while the redesigned labels were opaque, white and written on two sides with white letters on a dark background.
During the simulation, the anesthesia trainees needed to quickly choose the right medication for a crisis, but the carts in all simulations were incorrectly stocked with the wrong medication where the right one should have been. The simulations were videotaped to see if the altered labels helped them choose the right medication.
And it worked — the percentage of participants who corrected the right medication was significantly higher for the redesigned labels (63 percent) than the current labels (40 percent).
"The redesigned label prevented some potentially catastrophic errors from reaching the simulated patient," the researchers concluded.