DisparitiesLiquid Medication Dosing Errors by Hispanic Parents: Role of Health Literacy and English Proficiency
Section snippets
Participants and Setting
This was a cross-sectional analysis of data collected as part of a randomized, controlled experiment focused on identifying specific attributes of medication labels and dosing tools that can be optimized to reduce parent dosing errors (SAFE Rx for Kids study). Subjects were enrolled from 3 university-affiliated pediatric outpatient clinics that serve largely low-income populations (New York University, Stanford, Emory). Northwestern University served as the data management site and enrolled no
Results
Of 2110 parents enrolled in the SAFE Rx for Kids study between August 26, 2013, and December 18, 2014, a total of 1141 (54.1%) self-identified as Hispanic. Findings of the main study are reported elsewhere18; this analysis focuses only on Hispanic parents. Of the Hispanic parents enrolled, 15 were excluded because they did not complete a dosing (n = 1) or health literacy (n = 14) assessment. Thus, 1126 parents were included in analyses (Table 1). Nearly 70% of parents had LEP (69.2%); 82.7% had
Discussion
To our knowledge, this study is the first to specifically examine medication dosing errors made by Hispanic parents and the independent and combined roles of parent health literacy and English proficiency. We found that liquid medication dosing errors by Hispanic parents are common, with over 80% of parents making at least one error, and that errors were more common among those with limited health literacy and LEP. These findings demonstrate the importance of addressing health literacy and LEP
Acknowledgments
We thank our research staff and the staff of the pediatric outpatient clinics at Bellevue Hospital Center, Gardner Packard Children's Health Care Center, and Children's Hospital of Atlanta at Hughes Spaulding for their support.
Supported in part by funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)–National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) (R01 HD070864; principal investigator, H. Shonna Yin); authors funded as part of this grant include Drs Yin, Mendelsohn, Bailey,
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Conflict of Interest: Drs Bailey, Parker, and Wolf and Ms Jacobson have served as consultants to and received grant funding from Merck Sharp & Dohme for work unrelated to this study. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.