Web course on medication administration strengthens nursing students' competence prior to graduation

Background: Nursing students' competence has been found inadequate in mastering of pharmacotherapy regulations and prescriptions, pharmacology, medical calculations, fractional and decimal numbers, and mathematics on the whole.

Objectives: The study investigated the efficacy of an additional medication administration web course in increasing nursing students' self-evaluated competence on medication administration.

Design: Finnish nursing students self-evaluated their medication administration competence before and after the web-based medication course. Design was quasi-experimental.

Participants: 244 students answered the questionnaire before and 192 after the web course.

Methods: An online self-evaluation questionnaire was developed to measure students' competence on basic pharmacotherapy, intravenous medication and infusion, blood transfusion and epidural medication. The data was analysed with SPSS 18.0 software using descriptive analyses and comparing sum variables with Man-Whitney U-test.

Results: The medication administration web course, which took 8 h on average, significantly improved self-evaluated competence of nursing students in all the fields. Prior to the education most defects were found in matters concerning compatibility and adverse effects of pharmaceuticals and solutions and in epidural medication competency. The education strengthened all these competencies.

Conclusions: It is necessary to revise medication administration before graduation and web-based learning can be used in it.