There is an international consensus that nurses need mathematics and healthcare numeracy skills to provide safe nursing care. However, there is no consensus on the specific skills needed, subsequently drug dosage calculation and wider healthcare numeracy testing is highly varied and idiosyncratic. The root cause of this problem is that healthcare numeracy is culture-specific, and deeply embedded or hidden in the nucleus of professional nursing practice. In a revolutionary program of research and development, we reveal, classify and advance competence development of these skills, a process we call “decoding the DNA of healthcare numeracy”.

We report a 35+ year programme of research that is advancing international patient safety and professional nursing standards in the fields of drug dosage calculation and healthcare numeracy, pharmacology and medicines management. We present seminal advances on previous work in the field, via:

1. Decoding the 20 core mathematics skills that underpin nursing science and safe nursing and medical practice. Additionally, in a groundbreaking discovery, we report how distinctive combinations, arrangements and sequencing of healthcare numeracy skills form the mathematical basis of safe nursing and medical practice;
2. Defining a unique drug dosage calculation and healthcare numeracy competence model, and classifying the 20 mathematics and healthcare numeracy skills into a Healthcare Numeracy Taxonomy (HNT); and
3. Translating the HNT into a Future Nurse Suite & Curriculum of authentic virtual clinical education environments: safeMedicate^®; safeGUARD^®; safePHARM^® and safeHANDS^®. These environments combine to collectively advance the in-context learning, diagnostic assessment, targeted error remediation, and clinical application of drug dosage calculation & measurement, medicines management, pharmacology and mathematics & healthcare numeracy competence.