Findings from the ISMP Medication Safety Self-Assessment for hospitals.

Background: Hospital medication practices should be assessed, awareness of the characteristics of a safe medication system heightened, and baseline data to identify national priorities established.

Design: A cross-sectional survey of U.S.

Improving accuracy in simulated pharmacy assembly tasks using workspace interventions to enhance the cognitive environment.

In this study, the error-reducing effectiveness of two work-environment interventions was examined in a simulated pharmacy task. 110 participants worked for 3 to 4 hours filling approximately 110 orders for simulated drugs in a laboratory-based, controlled environment. One group of participants used a monitor-mounted copy strip to enhance data entry, and another group used the copy strips as well as labeled product sleeves on stock bottles to enhance product selection.

Susceptibility to illusions and cognitive style: implications for pharmacy dispensing.

Response distributions for five cognitive illusions and one visual illusion were examined in two samples, college students (n = 134) and pharmacists (n = 51). These illusions were selected for study on the basis of pharmacists' judgments about associations of illusions to common dispensing errors. Participants were categorized as Illusion-prone or Illusion-resistant, and distributions of such tendencies for the six stimuli used varied within samples.