The aim of this work was to explore the views and opinions of healthcare providers and (public) health researchers on the identification of antibiotics and the harmonisation of their appearance.
Main conclusions:
- About half of healthcare providers, health care researchers and medicine suppliers experienced difficulties in identifying
antibiotics and discriminating them from other commonly used medicine.
Most participants agreed that standardising the physical appearance of
antibiotics could help improve their recognition and benefit patient safety.
The data also suggest that not all prescribe have awareness of how oral
antibiotic look like. - There is not a specific physical feature that makes it easy to identify antibiotics. The data also suggests that antibiotics come in many different physical presentations with many different colours and sizes being associated with oral antibiotics across different countries.
- The main physical features used by participants to identify antibiotics at the
unit level are the dosage form, pill colour and pill size.
ABACUS project 