Safety closures after fifteen years

Safety closures still are often the butt of jokes and many adults complain of inability to use CRCs. It has been suggested that pharmacists should devote more attention to instructing patients in the use of CRCs. We studied a random sample of adults (AC) and three "Golden Age" groups (GA). We measured the time taken in operating CRCs and the effect of training. For palm/turn CRCs there was no difference between AC and GA, or trained (T) and untrained (UT) groups. For "arrow" CRCs a significant (p less than .01) difference was found in all comparisons (UTAC vs TAC, UTGA vs TGA, UTAC vs UTGA, TAC vs TGA). The GA groups had difficulty seeing the white on white arrows but once found, could open the CRC with one hand and preferred this type CRC. This physical defect could not be overcome by training. All pretraining times were so short that training makes no important improvement. Improving visibility of characters on the CRC would be a greater utility.