Appropriate drug dosage and use are relevant factors to ensure that the patient receives the exact dose of the drug to ensure clinical efficacy, as well as protecting the patient from adverse reactions caused by the toxicity of the drug itself. However, international research shows that nursing students find it difficult to calculate doses and numerical calculation skills are crucial to ensure safe drug management.

Identifying the specific aspects of dose calculation procedures that are most commonly associated with errors, researchers from the Department of Nursing Laia Wennberg, Pilar Fuster, Encarna Rodríguez, Albert Gallart and Mireia Llauradó conducted the study “Where do nursing students make mistakes when calculating drug doses? A retrospective study.”

The study has been published in the academic research journal BMC Nursing and is a retrospective analysis of a total of 285 written exams, which included dose calculation exercises, taken by students in the first three years of the Bachelor’s Degree in Nursing. The work allowed the researchers to evaluate relationship between the presence of errors and the proportion of correct and incorrect final answers in relation to 23 agreed categories involving different calculation process steps in more than 1000 dose calculation exercises.

Although students make fewer mistakes as they progress through their studies, the study results show that the most common mistakes are related to unit conversion, more complex concepts such as maximum concentration and minimum dilution, and not contextualising the response to the clinical case.
 

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