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Ability of hospital doctors to calculate drug doses

^a Department of Anaesthesia, Manchester Royal Infirmary, Manchester M13 9WL

Correspondence to: Dr Rolfe.

The contents of most drug ampoules are given as their mass concentration (mg or µg/ml), but a few drugs are traditionally given as a dilution or percentage concentration--for example, 1:1000 or 1% respectively. Many drugs used in resuscitation and acute medical emergencies are labelled in this way--for example, adrenaline 1:1000 and sodium bicarbonate 8.4% solution.

A survey showed that many junior doctors could not calculate the mass of lignocaine in ampoules of different concentrations.¹ We investigated further the ability of hospital doctors to convert between mass concentrations, dilutions, and percentage concentrations. We also asked which convention they preferred and the adequacy of their teaching on calculating drug doses.

Answers to questions on drug doses. Values are numbers (percentages) of hospital doctors
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Question                                      Right                  Wrong                Don't know
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 How much noradrenaline
  (in mg) is there in 4 ml of a
  1:1000 solution?:
  . . . [Full text of this article]

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