Effectiveness of Standardized Patient Simulation Scenarios on Medication Administration Confidence in Nursing Students
151 Pages Posted: 22 Mar 2018
Date Written: July 28, 2016
Abstract
A major threat to patient safety is medication administration error (MAE) (Kim & Bates, 2013). Nurse educators are responsible for training future nurses to administer medications safely and competently. One barrier to achieving this goal is student lack of confidence due to limited experience and knowledge regarding human and system factors. A potential solution to increasing student confidence with medication administration (MA) is use of standardized patient simulation (SPS) experiences developed using the Nursing Education Simulation Framework (NESF). There is limited evidence in the literature to support the use of SPS to increase student confidence with MA. This project sought to answer the question: “Among fourth semester BSN students, what effect does the completion of three SPS MA scenarios have on confidence level?” A quantitative, quasi-experimental, one group pretest-posttest approach was used and involved 3 SPSs that highlighted system complexities (i.e. distractions and interruptions) of the MA process. Grundy’s C-Scale (1993) was used to measure student levels of confidence before and after the intervention. A paired-samples t-test revealed no statistically significant difference in confidence levels from Time 1 (M= 16.81, SD= 3.12) to Time 2 (M= 17.19, SD= 2.695), t (20) = .411, p= .685 (two-tailed). The mean change in confidence level was .381 with a 95% CI ranging from -2.32 to 1.55. Sample size (n=21), convenience sample, and a homogeneous group were limitations to the study. This study has provided some insight into the use of MA SPS scenarios in regard to the effect roles and human and system factors have on nursing student level of confidence with MA when the NESF is used for scenario development.
Keywords: standardized patient simulation, confidence, medication administration, Nursing Education Simulation Framework, nursing students
JEL Classification: 120,121,123
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation