The Effectiveness of Enhancing Nursing Students' Knowledge of Medications through M-Learning

Project: A - Government Institutionb - National Science and Technology Council

Project Details

Description

Improving patient safety has become an essential issue recently. Malpractice is the major concern regarding patient safety. In this, medication errors are the most common incidents in the medical or nursing malpractice. Several studies have found that one of the main reasons of medication errors made by nurses or nursing students is medication knowledge deficit. Generally, nursing students acquire the medication knowledge through school education in order to correctly administer medication in their clinical placement or future practice for providing better safety care for the patients. However, the literature indicated that improving nursing students’ medication knowledge for preventing medication errors is the challenge in the nursing education at the present time. In addition, the studies also found that nursing students might feel anxiety, pressure, or less confidence in the clinical practice due to insufficient medication knowledge. How to enhance students’ medication knowledge is an important lesson for the nursing faculties. New technologies are changing rapidly and have the potential to play an important role in education, such as from e-learning to m-learning and from classroom teaching to anywhere learning. With the development and innovation of the mobile devices, the learning and teaching become more available and accessible. Mobile phone is one of the mobile devices and its penetration rate has exceeded 100%. Short message service (SMS) is one of most popular communication ways using mobile phones among younger people. Therefore, this study is going to develop a supplement learning materials of medication knowledge and the contents of materials will be sent by SMS to the nursing students. The aim of the study is to evaluate the effectiveness of using mobile phone SMS message in enhancing knowledge of medications among nursing students. This project will be conducted in two years in order to answer the research questions. Year one project A quasi-experimental design, with two groups and pre-posttest, will be applied. A purposive sample in one university will be recruited. The inclusion criteria are the students who major in nursing, are taking Pharmacology or Study of Drugs courses, and have their own personal mobile phone. The participants will be randomly assigned into experimental and comparison groups after signing the informed consent. The students in the experimental group will receive the supplement learning materials regarding medication knowledge via SMS and those in the comparative group will receive nothing. Data will be collected at baseline and at the 2nd week, 4th week, and 12th week after the intervention, using the questionnaires developed by researchers. However, the participants in comparison group will receive same learning materials after the completion of collecting last posttest data in order to meet ethical requirements. Data analysis will be conducted by performing percentage, mean, t-test, Chi-square, one-way ANOVA, Pearson r, and Mixed Model through SPSS software. Year two project A qualitative approach will be applied in this study. In-depth semi-structured interviews will be the method being used to collect the data. The participants are the nursing students who participate in the intervention group in the previous year. Data will be collected until the information is saturated. All data are transcribed and coded for emerging themes. The findings of this study will provide nursing students the more accessible and appropriate method to learn medication knowledge after regular lecture. It is hoped that the students can have sufficient medication knowledge and deliver more quality health care for the patients in the future practice. It is also expected that this learning method can be applied to different courses and the students in medical or related health care.
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date8/1/107/31/11

Keywords

  • short message service (SMS)
  • nursing students
  • m-learning
  • medication knowledge

Fingerprint

Explore the research topics touched on by this project. These labels are generated based on the underlying awards/grants. Together they form a unique fingerprint.