• B A Degnan, L J Murray, C P Dunling, K D Whittlestone, T D A Standley, A K Gupta, and D W Wheeler.
• Department of Anaesthesia, University of Cambridge, Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, UK.
• Anaesthesia. 2006 Dec 1;61(12):1155-60.

AbstractMedical students have difficulty calculating drug doses correctly, but better teaching improves their performance in written tests. We conducted a blinded, randomised, controlled trial to assess the benefit of online teaching on students' ability to administer drugs in a simulated critical incident scenario, during which they were scored on their ability to administer drugs in solution presented as a ratio (adrenaline) or percentage (lidocaine). Forty-eight final year medical students were invited to participate; 44 (92%) attended but only nine of the 20 students (45%) directed to the extra teaching viewed it. Nevertheless, the teaching module significantly improved the students' ability to calculate the correct volume of lidocaine (p = 0.005) and adrenaline (p = 0.0002), and benefited each student's overall performance (p = 0.0007). Drug administration error is a very major problem and few interventions are known to be effective. We show that focusing on better teaching at medical school may benefit patient safety.

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