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7:14am May 20, 2015
ameliabaggs: Medication safety. What do you do when you have meds that look too much alike? (My brain focuses on “Children’s” and loses the rest.) I just gave myself 10 mL of Benadryl instead of Tylenol. I only caught it because it went into my tube too easily, Tylenol is a very thick liquid. No harm done, but a similar med error with different meds could be deadly. So we are using color coded dots to differentiate meds that otherwise look alike. One dot on the bottle, one on the lid, and one in the med sign off sheet. With any meds in similar bottles or with other similarities, we try to use contrasting colors. Like two other meds that are often issues in identical bottles, get yellow and purple. Which also fit my synesthesia, but I can’t hope to do that with every med. Acetaminophen fits blue, but Benadryl/diphenhydramine has no pink letters. Just a pink liquid usually. Actually Q-dryl has a pink letter right at the beginning, but that’s not the only brand of Benadryl I get. I chose pink because it matched the usual liquid color. (Tylenol differs in color by flavor.)

ameliabaggs:

Medication safety. What do you do when you have meds that look too much alike? (My brain focuses on “Children’s” and loses the rest.)

I just gave myself 10 mL of Benadryl instead of Tylenol. I only caught it because it went into my tube too easily, Tylenol is a very thick liquid. No harm done, but a similar med error with different meds could be deadly. So we are using color coded dots to differentiate meds that otherwise look alike. One dot on the bottle, one on the lid, and one in the med sign off sheet.

With any meds in similar bottles or with other similarities, we try to use contrasting colors. Like two other meds that are often issues in identical bottles, get yellow and purple. Which also fit my synesthesia, but I can’t hope to do that with every med. Acetaminophen fits blue, but Benadryl/diphenhydramine has no pink letters. Just a pink liquid usually. Actually Q-dryl has a pink letter right at the beginning, but that’s not the only brand of Benadryl I get. I chose pink because it matched the usual liquid color. (Tylenol differs in color by flavor.)