At least 5% of pediatric admissions are complicated by medication error. Nurses can prevent some errors by genuine verifying prescriptions before administering drugs, which requires plentiful narcotic reckoning skills and participation with the BNFc. We wished to inspect if a newly devised chart would boost nurses’ potion calculation command and thus potentially contract doctors’ prescription errors.

To examine nurses’ know-how to calculate doses of gentamicin for neonates and children using a dissimilar elementary dosing chart compared with the BNFc.

Two gentamicin dosing charts (paediatric and neonatal) devised by a multidisciplinary assortment 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 licence dosage and correctly frequency.

51 nurses participated. 11 nurses (22%) answered all four questions correctly. A higher proportion prerrogative 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%), awry frequency (17%) and one 10-fold dosing error. When using the chart, there were no dosing errors, solitary frequency errors for the neonatal regimen.

The chart was enhanced reliable, quicker and may be appropriate for patient safety. Revising the format of the BNFc may be toward for nurses.