Letters

Calculating drug doses

EDITOR,--S Rolfe and N J N Harper draw attention to the NHS specification for ampoule labels and suggest that all drugs should be measured as mass concentration.¹ The original work that was undertaken on ampoule labelling arrived at the same conclusion.² Wider discussions with practitioners when the NHS specification was being prepared highlighted potential dangers of making the changes that Rolfe and Harper now request. The NHS specification also recognises that many biological products--for example, vaccines--cannot be defined in terms of mass concentration.

Lee Baldwin suggests that adopting a standard for type size might enable more information to be placed on ampoule labels.³ The particular problem with ampoule labels is their small size. The information on the labels needs to be kept to a minimum so that essential information, defined in the NHS specification as volume, generic name, amount, route(s) of injection, and expiry . . . [Full text of this article]

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