Usability Evaluation of Intravascular Administration Set with Safety Lock Regulator to Prevent Medication Error

Abstract

The safety lock regulator is part of an intravascular administration set with a safety lock to control the infusion rate of fluid and prevent accidents in which fluid is excessively injected due to unexpected events. This study aims to evaluate the usability and satisfaction of intravascular administration set with a safety lock regulator through a usability test. In the usability test, consisting of 22 tasks and 5 scenarios, experienced nurses with an average experience of 6.6 years or more participated to perform tasks and evaluate satisfaction. we collected a number of observational data such as task completion, task completion with an issue and not completion as well as subjective data such as user satisfaction scores and comprehensive opinions. As a result of the evaluation, the success rate of the entire task was 96%, and there were almost no use errors at 4%. The root causes of the observed use errors were low risk due to the lack of understanding of the tasks. The user satisfaction with the 10 questionnaires evaluated on the 5-point Likert scale showed 4.7 scores for the user manual and 4.4 scores for the intravascular administration set. In addition, comprehensive opinions such as user improvement requirements for medical devices and specific reasons for satisfaction were collected. This study confirms that users can safely perform tasks of the use scenario without serious use errors and that safety was improved by preventing operations of the non-medical person by making it difficult to unlock the safety lock regulator. In future studies, it is expected that it will be possible to develop an intravascular administration set that further improves usability and safety by deriving user requirements from the collected comprehensive opinions.

Keywords: Usability Evaluation, Intravascular Administration Set, Safety Lock Regulator, Medication Error

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1003494