Standardization and use of colour for labelling of injectable drugs
Poor labelling has been identified as a contributing factor of medication errors, particularly for those involving injectable drugs. Colour coding and colour differentiation are two major techniques being used on labels to aid drug identification. However, neither approach has been scientifically proven to minimize the occurrence of or harm from medication errors. This study investigates potential effects of three different approaches for using colour on standardized labels on the task of identifying a specific drug from a storage area via a controlled experiment involving human users. The results show that people might be vulnerable to confusion from drugs that have look-alike labels and also have look-alike, sound-alike drug names. In particular, when each drug label had a fairly unique colour scheme, participants were more prone to misperceive the look-alike, sound-alike drug name as the correct drug name than when no colour was used or when colour was used on the labels with no apparent one-to-one association between the label colour and the drug identity.
Jennifer Jeon Catherine M. Burns
Department of Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
国际会议
17th World Congress on Ergonomics(第十七届国际人类工效学大会)
北京
英文
1-10
2009-08-09（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）