Dataset for "User-testing guidelines to improve the safety of intravenous medicines administration: a randomised in-situ simulation study"

Why did we carry out this research? One out of every ten injections into veins in the UK is prepared or given in the wrong way. Some of these mistakes will cause unnecessary harm to the patient. To help prevent these mistakes, the NHS publishes the Injectable Medicines Guide (IMG). This NHS website tells nurses how to prepare each injection correctly. Some people think that the IMG is confusing for nurses. This is worrying, as research shows that confusing information can cause mistakes. So improving the design of the IMG might lead to fewer mistakes. In the first part of this project, we used a process called “user testing” to find out what information nurses found confusing in the IMG. We then redesigned the IMG to solve these problems. In this part of the project, we wanted to find out if using our new design for the IMG made it safer to give injections. What were we aiming to find out? Our aim was to find out if nurses using our new IMG design made fewer mistakes than nurses using the original design. How did we do this research? We asked 273 nurses to prepare and give a dose of a pretend medicine to a model patient. They did this whilst they were working on a ward in one of five hospitals. To help the nurses with this task, they were randomly given either the original IMG design or our new design. We watched them whilst they prepared and gave the dose and recorded any mistakes that were made. We also timed how long it took. Then we asked the nurses to answer a questionnaire about how confident they felt using the IMG. What data is included here? This archive includes the documents we created to help us carry out this research, data on our participants and how many errors they made, and details of interviews we carried out with some nurses.

These data describe a randomised in situ simulation experiment to compare the rate of errors made by hospital nurses during the administration of an intravenous medicine when using current or user-tested injectable medicines guidelines. The files in this archive include:

- the study protocol;
- data collection tools;
- the two guidelines compared in the study;
- quantitative data on participant demographics, errors and participant feedback;
- an expert panel's analysis of the severity of the observed errors;
- transcriptions and analysis of debrief interviews with participants.