Table 3.
Key themes emerging from testing of aid 2
| Key themes [aid 2] | Subthemes | Reported impact | Examples | Recommendation to be incorporated into aid 4 |
| Physical characteristics (font size and type, use of colour, contrast) | Colour (poor use of) Only looked at the red |
Eye drawn only to red, other information ignored | "There was so much red…too much. I couldn’t focus on any one thing or work out what the priorities were." | Sparing use of red to focus attention |
| Text dense without enough white space; font too small | Hard to find relevant information; aid discarded | "The front looked too busy and I couldn’t spend time on it." | Larger font, uncluttered appearance | |
| Layout | Flowchart with both left → right and top → bottom streams | Information missed; too many streams resulted in divided attention | "The layout was really confusing. I missed the need for the infusion to be run in parallel because of this." | Single stream desirable |
| Two sided | Information missed including dosing information | "There was so much information on the front that I put it straight down. I didn’t see the stuff on the back like the dose… it would have been really useful if I’d seen it because I was totally reliant on the aid to tell me the dose." | Single-sided desirable | |
| Ordering of steps | Information missed, aid discarded | "The most useful information was right at the bottom on the back – I didn’t notice this until afterwards." | Flowchart desirable to communicate sequence of steps including priorities and timeline | |
| Content | Volume of information | Took too long to find information needed to treat crisis so discarded aid | "This was unusable in the crisis, there was too much information and it was confusing." | Background information not immediately relevant to the crisis removed and presented elsewhere |
| Relevance of content | Information not relevant during crisis was distracting; no clear treatment end points; incorrect dose given | "I had to focus on the resuscitation…I couldn’t access any other information (apart from the initial dose)…I didn’t realise I might have needed to continue for 60 min." "I knew I needed to give lipid and all I wanted was the dose. I couldn’t find it." "I completely disregarded the bottom box on follow up." |
Limit information presented on aid to that immediately required in emergency Use of clear end points, for example, resuscitation may take 1 hour |
|
| Need for calculations | Incorrect dose given | "I found it impossible to do even simple calculations with everything else going on." | Provide absolute doses for different weights |