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Description
EBP
PICOT: In emergent situations in a pediatric ICU requiring nurses to draw up emergent doses of medication, is it safer to use color coded, pre-printed fill-in-the-dose medication labels vs. our current practice of white handwritten labels? In our pediatric ICUs, nurses use handwritten labels for emergent drug administration, which can lead to illegibility and increased risks of adverse events. This project assessed whether pre-printed, color-coded, fill-in-the-blank labels enhance nurse confidence and nurses’ perceptions of patient safety during emergent drug procedures.
Literature/Evidence: Search strategy in the CINAHL (EBSCOhost) database used MeSH headings and keywords, including English articles published within the last ten years. Evidence highlighted that adopting color-coded labels, modeled after anesthesia standards, can improve drug labeling safety in hospitals.
Evaluation: Led by an ICU nurse, our project implemented color-coded, pre-printed labels in a PICU. Our team included an anesthesiologist, PICU leadership, pharmacists, and ICU nurses. New drug labels were placed in individual drug bins inside and adjacent to the medication dispenser, where nurses retrieved medications, completed and affixed labels to syringes at the bedside. Staff nurses were surveyed before and after the intervention to assess their perceptions of safety with color-coded preprinted labels. Surveys conducted pre and post intervention indicated significant improvements in nurses' ability to differentiate syringes (25% to 96%) and confidence in label legibility and completeness (51% to 91%). Overall confidence in using color-coded labels for emergent procedures improved (87% to 96%). Initially, 82% of nurses agreed that these labels would enhance patient safety, which rose to 96% post-intervention. While literature on PICU medication labeling is limited, our project demonstrated that color-coded, pre-printed labels bolster nurse confidence and perceived patient safety. Further research is warranted to validate these findings across diverse PICU settings.
Publication Date
9-27-2024
Keywords
EBP, Evidence-Based Pracitce, Evidence-Based Nursing, Medications, PICU, Pediatric Intensive Care
Disciplines
Pediatric Nursing
Recommended Citation
Hajovsky, Christine, "Emergent Medication Labels in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit" (2024). 2024. 30.
https://scholarlycollection.childrens.com/nursing-anf2024/30
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
