Understanding Drug Measurements
Healthcare providers administering medicines must be able to calculate and administer the correct dose of medicine to a patient. Different measures are used for drug dosages in healthcare and may need to be converted to another unit of measurement. Drugs are measured according to either:
- Weight of the drug (ex. Grams, milligrams)
- Volume: (ex. Millilitres, litres)
- Standarised international units
- Strength of the solution when a weight of the drug is dissolved in a volume of liquid
- Percentages, when a drug is 100 parts of a product
Many medication errors have been made through not converting between different units of measurements correctly, resulting in doses of 10 to 100 times more than prescribed.
