Three in five parents mismeasured an infant paracetamol dose
Asked to measure from written instructions, 59% of parents missed by more than a fifth. Adding a diagram of the dose brought that down to 44%.
What the study found
A picture of the dose cut large infant overdoses from 5.6% to 0.6%
Parents at a paediatric clinic were asked to measure a dose of infant acetaminophen from written instructions, and 59% missed by more than a fifth. Adding a diagram of the dose brought that to 44%. Even the better instructions left two parents in five getting it wrong.
The caveat · 78% of parents had limited literacy
One urban public hospital clinic where 78% of parents had limited health literacy, so these are not general-population error rates. The benefit was concentrated in that group and was not detectable among parents with adequate literacy. It was a supervised measurement task rather than several days of dosing at home, and no child was harmed in it. The product tested was the older concentrated infant drops with a dropper, a format the United States has since changed.