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To evaluate the effect of observation chart design on the ability of health professionals and novice chart users to recognise patient deterioration.

Participants were 45 health professionals (doctors and nurses) and 46 novices. Each participant completed 48 trials in which they viewed realistic patient observations recorded on six hospital observation charts of differing design quality. Each chart design was used on eight trials, four times with normal data and four times with abnormal data. On each trial, the participant's task was to identify any abnormal observation or else to indicate that all observations were normal (based on normal physiological ranges given in the instructions). The main outcome measures were participants’ error rates and response times for detecting abnormal observations on each of the six charts.

There was a significant effect of chart type on error rates (p<0.001), but …