This study suggests that few people can accurately describe how liquid medications are to be administered and that the inability to do so is not associated with sociodemographic factors, HL skills, or the wording of dosing instructions.
ArticleWomen’s Understanding of Different Dosing Instructions for a Liquid Pediatric Medication
Section snippets
Participants and Procedures
A total of 193 women of child-bearing age were recruited to participate in this study from an outpatient obstetrics and gynecology residency clinic in the southeastern United States between May and July 2010. Eligibility criteria included being 21 to 45 years of age, English-speaking, and currently enrolled in TennCare (Medicaid). Potential participants who appeared too ill or had poor visual acuity were excluded. A research assistant (RA) approached patients while they were in the waiting room
Participants’ Sociodemographic Characteristics and Health Literacy Skills
The women averaged 29.1 ± 6.4 years of age. Most women were white (81.9%), married (58.0%), and currently lived with one or more children (80.3%). Almost one fifth (18.7%) of the women had not completed high school, and nearly half (48.7%) had inadequate HL skills. As expected in a randomized controlled trial, sociodemographic characteristics and HL skills did not differ between participants randomly assigned to either medication label instruction group (Table 1).
Description and Demonstration of Pediatric Liquid Medication Use
The majority of participants
Discussion
This study offers new findings regarding women’s ability to both describe and demonstrate use of a commonly prescribed liquid medication. Just over one third of respondents were able to correctly describe how they would administer the medication during a 24-hour period, and three quarters of respondents accurately demonstrated how they would administer one dose of the medication. In adjusted multivariate analyses, sociodemographic characteristics, HL skills, and label instruction format did not
Limitations
Our results should be considered in the context of several limitations. First, the ability to generalize these findings may be limited by the fact that participants were recruited from a single residency clinic in the southeastern United States. Second, participants initially were recruited on the basis of convenience and then randomly assigned to receive a medication bottle with implicit or explicit instructions, raising the possibility of selection bias in the overall group of study
Conclusions
Lorraine S. Wallace, Associate Professor, Department of Family Medicine, The Ohio State University College of Medicine, Columbus, OH.
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Cited by (0)
Lorraine S. Wallace, Associate Professor, Department of Family Medicine, The Ohio State University College of Medicine, Columbus, OH.
Amy J. Keenum, Associate Professor, University of Tennessee Graduate School of Medicine, Department of Family Medicine, Knoxville, TN.
Jennifer E. DeVoe, Associate Professor, Oregon Health and Science University, Department of Family Medicine, Portland, OR.
Shannon K. Bolon, Primary Care Medical Education Branch Chief, Health Resources and Services Administration, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Rockville, MD.
Julie S. Hansen, Graduate Research Assistant, University of Tennessee Graduate School of Medicine, Knoxville, TN.
Conflicts of interest: None to report.