Although previously only the benefits of medicines were of interest, recently the safety of their use has attracted attention to prevent medical accidents. Our investigation shows that many medicinal near-miss incidents occur because of similarity in names or appearance among different products. To avoid such confusion, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in Japan issued a declaration obligating pharmaceutical companies to display bar codes on the label of ethical medicines to avoid medical accidents. To identify what health care professionals perceive as the ideal layout of a label including the bar code, and to assess their awareness of the declaration and response, we conducted a questionnaire survey targeted at pharmacists and nurses.
In this article, we apply a data-mining technique to find relationships between respondent attribute data and response data concerning the ideal bar code display for ampoules and awareness of the issued declaration.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.