Interruptions are a common cause of errors in the pharmacy, cited as being responsible for as much as 43%of the error that occurs in medication administration. The purpose of this study was to explore thecharacteristics of interruptions in a hospital pharmacy setting and to determine the extent to which existingtheories of interruptions can account for our findings. As a central feature of this work, we chose toexamine a characteristic of interruptions seldom examined in laboratory studies, which is the source of theinterruption. The findings from this study begin to suggest that the theories developed to explain thecognitive mechanisms by which people resume from interruptions do apply to the pharmacy setting.Further, the data suggest that preservation of the system state has a protective effect on performance.
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