Untangling Infusion Confusion: A Comparative Evaluation of Interventions in a Simulated Intensive Care Setting

OBJECTIVES: Assess interventions’ impact on preventing IV infusion identification and disconnection mix-ups. DESIGN: Experimental study with repeated measures design. SETTING: High fidelity simulated adult ICU. SUBJECTS: Forty critical care nurses. INTERVENTIONS: Participants had to correctly identify infusions and disconnect an infusion in four different conditions: baseline (current practice); line labels/organizers; smart pump; and light-linking system. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: Participants identified infusions with significantly fewer errors when using line labels/organizers (0; 0%) than in the baseline (12; 7.7%) and smart pump conditions (10; 6.4%) (p < 0.01). The light-linking system did not significantly affect identification errors (5; 3.2%) compared with the other conditions. Participants were significantly faster identifying infusions when using line labels/organizers (0:31) than in the baseline (1:20), smart pump (1:29), and light-linking (1:22) conditions (p < 0.001). When disconnecting an infusion, there was no significant difference in errors between conditions, but participants were significantly slower when using the smart pump than all other conditions (p < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that line labels/organizers may increase infusion identification accuracy and efficiency.