Abstract
According to Taiwan Patient Safety Reporting System established since 2004, the most of abnormal events during the period of years from 2005 to 2011 was about medication issue and totally 58977. It is without saying that patient safety is the core value of medical service. It was known that before defensing patient safety it is necessary to consolidate medication safety. Hence, the dispensing process operated by pharmacists is the critical point to maintain medication safety. The researches linked to visual scanning during the dispensing tasks are relatively rare. It is a primary requirement to collect related behavior data for being the researching foundation if we dedicate to prevent radically identification errors resulted from human factors. For this reason, the research issue of this study is focused on eye movements under dispensing process which are recorded objectively by an eye tracker. Besides, the research is also combined with the subjective method to interview participants for exploring how the medicine's name indication influence a pharmacist’s visual behaviors while processing dispensing tasks. It is expected to find out the related human factors and improve dispensing quality and medication safety. The present study is to apply experimental method based on field setting. All of participants, independent variables, dispensing tasks and operating environments are set with reality. Thirty pharmacists who all serve in hospital and come from different hospitals participate in this experiment. The independent variable is the information layout on medicine bag arranged with medicine name, dose or alert message. In addition, dependent variables are about visual behaviors and participants’ interview contents. Visual behaviors include fixations, average fixation duration and visual tracks. The results indicate that medicine name all use capital letters of the alphabet presented subjects whose average fixation duration longer. The results also shown that different layout of medicine name affect number of fixations and eye movement data, the previous of alert messages have a greater tendency. The transverse direction is normally read text from left to right, but high stress and time pressure, a combination of a plurality of sub information is read from the message, it is likely to be a personal experience or preference to selective reading situation. If subjects were divided into senior and junior pharmacists, found that different seniority viewing percent time spent in zone with statistically significant differences. On the visual behavior of senior pharmacists have more regressions and check before bagging, are willing to spend more time ensuring medication safety.