Clinical skills: a practical guide to working out drug calculations

With the publication "Building a Safer NHS for Patients" (Department of Health (DoH), 2004), the importance of ensuring safe medication administration has returned to the NHS agenda. Over the last 10 years, nurses' deficiency in accurate drug calculations has been highlighted. A number of proactive strategies have been employed, including increased focus on the topic during undergraduate training programmes, drug calculation tests and, more recently, providing information via hospital intranet sites. This article attempts to describe the basic drug calculation formulae required to calculate medication doses safely and accurately and administration rates, giving working examples to apply theory to clinical practice.