Authors : Shazia Khan, Pamela Chia, Shariq Ali Khan
DOI : 10.18231/j.ijca.2019.051
Volume : 6
Issue : 2
Year : 2019
Page No : 274-279
Introduction: Medication errors occur in around 0.75% to 5% of all anaesthesia related medication administrations. We developed the “Additional verification of intravenous drug (AVOID) -error System” to reduce medication-errors in Anaesthesia and tested the effect of this system on drug-administration time and end-user acceptance in a simulated environment.
Materials and Methods: A randomized-controlled cross-over trial study on 20 anaesthesiologists from Singapore General Hospital was conducted in a simulated operating-room environment in September 2018. Participants were randomized to administer five 1 millilitre doses, from a prefilled pre-labelled syringe with and without the AVOID-error System, (intervention group and control group, respectively). The primary outcome recorded was time to complete a “drug administration”. Additionally, all study participants were individually asked to give an opinion about the effect of the AVOID-error system on workload, medication error reduction and willingness to use in their routine practice using a five-point Likert scale. A Paired t-test was used for inter-group comparison and statistical significance was defined as p < 0>
Results: Twenty Anaesthesiologists, (12 consultants and 8 trainees) with median 8.5 years (IQR, 3.75-22) of experience participated in the study. The mean time to complete a drug administration in the intervention and control groups were, 18.2 (SD ± 5.3) and 12.6(SD ± 3.8) seconds (p =0.001), respectively.
Conclusions: On an average, the use of the Avoid-error system increased the total drug-administration time by 5.6 (95% CI: 4.6 - 6.5) seconds.
Keywords: Human factors, Medical device, Medication error.