Improving Nursing Students' Medication Safety Knowledge and Skills on Using the 4C/ID Learning Model

Learning medication-safety has become a focus in many countries to improve medication-safety competencies in nursing students. Research on instructional design for medication-safety is still limited, especially about the use of the Four Components Instructional Design (4C/ID) model. This study aimed to compare the knowledge and skills in medication safety of nursing students after the medication-safety training using four components of instructional design known as 4C/ID.

This was a posttest-only quasi-experimental study using an intervention and control group. The participants were the third-semester students of a nursing school at Yogyakarta, Indonesia (intervention: n=55, control: n=40). The intervention group was trained for five weeks using the 4C/ID approach with interactive lectures, small group discussions, reflections, and skills simulation sessions. An observational skills evaluation and Multiple-Choice Questionnaire were administered in the last week after the training completed. Independent sample t-test and Mann Whitney tests were used to analyze the mean differences of knowledge and skills in giving oral medicine and drug injections between the two groups.

The majority of respondents were female (74.1%), aged 19-20 years (77.8%), with GPA >3 (87.37%) and, the majority had never received instruction about patient safety (69%). There were significant mean differences in overall knowledge (p<0.05) and also in the skills of oral drug and intramuscular drug administration (p<0.05) between the intervention and control groups.

Training in medication-safety using the 4C/ID approach could improve the medication-safety knowledge and skills of the nursing students based on simple to complex learning.