Improving the correct prescription and dosage of gentamicin.

Gentamicin is an amino glycoside antibiotic, which is used predominantly in gram-negative infections but also has anti-staphylococcal activity. It is commonly used because of its lack of diffogenicity. There are recognised issues with its dosing of which time is a major factor. A baseline study demonstrated that dosing was only being carried out correctly 30% of the time. This has serious consequences for the treatment of infections. This quality improvement project intervened with the use of a gentamicin calculator, which enabled users to perform three complex mathematical equations simultaneously without error. Post measurement demonstrated that correct dosing had increased to 92%, which was a significant increase.