Imagine that you are being wheeled in to a hospital with a severe medical issue. As you are placed on a hospital bed, the doctors and nurses examine you and try to do everything they can in this stressful moment to figure out the best course of treatment. Eventually, they figure it out. They need to give you a certain substance via an IV bag. So one of the nurses leaves the room and rushes to go find your medicine.
When the nurse returns, they hook up the IV bag and you start to feel at ease knowing that you will be better soon. There’s just one problem: the nurse grabbed the wrong IV bag and you aren’t receiving the medicine you need. In fact, within an hour, you start feeling much worse.
Sadly this hypothetical situation happens far too often in medical institutions, and the heightened urgency during emergency situations can make it more likely for a medical professional to make a mistake when identifying medications.
That’s what makes a new study so interesting: it found that the way IV bags are labeled are actually far from optimal. The clear packaging with small black text makes it difficult to read and identify. So researchers developed a new bag — one that was opaque and that had a black box with white text in it.
The study then placed medical professionals in emergency scenarios and asked people to identify the proper IV bag given the situation. What the study found is that the opaque bags were far easier to identify. Maybe sometime soon IV bags can be redesigned so that they are easier to read, thus limiting the number of medication errors.
Source: Medical Xpress, “Label design may affect risk of medication errors in OR,” March 16, 2015
