At least 5% of pediatric admissions are complicated by medication error. Nurses can prevent some errors by correct verifying prescriptions before administering drugs, which requires comprehensive narcotic reckoning skills and knowledge with the BNFc. We wished to analyze if a newly devised chart would emend nurses’ potion calculation bent and thus potentially intersect doctors’ prescription errors.

To research nurses’ faculty to calculate doses of gentamicin for neonates and children using a contemporary mild dosing chart compared with the BNFc.

Two gentamicin dosing charts (paediatric and neonatal) devised by a multidisciplinary body to simplify dose calculation and choice of closeness were compared with the BNFc using four questions (two neonatal, two paediatric) asking ward nurses to calculate gentamicin doses. Answers were scored for both the correctly dosage and prerrogative frequency.

51 nurses participated. 11 nurses (22%) answered all four questions correctly. A higher proportion licence answered both the dosage and frequency questions simultaneously when using the chart compared with the BNFc: paediatric questions 100% (51/51 chart) versus 80% (41/51 BNFc) (OR 0.20) and neonatal questions 55% (28/51 chart) versus 35% (18/51 BNFc) (OR 0.2). Errors when using the BNFc were due to selection of the incorrect regimen (23%), error frequency (17%) and one 10-fold dosing error. When using the chart, there were no dosing errors, one shot frequency errors for the neonatal regimen.

The chart was aggrandized reliable, quicker and may be great for patient safety. Revising the format of the BNFc may be gainful for nurses.