Title : Impact of a hybrid educational course for nursing staff on pain assessment and initial treatment in a tertiary care hospital
Abstract:
Introduction: Nurses work closely with patients and are the first responder to patient’s issues. Ward nurses play a vital role in regular assessment and timely management of pain and side effects related to analgesics. Therefore, they must have proper knowledge and awareness regarding post-operative pain. It has been recommended that nurses should have in-service training programs and refresh courses to improve their knowledge to reflect on their clinical practice while working with patients.
Aims and Objectives: The primary objectives were to develop the educational course and assess the impact of the course on the knowledge and skills regarding pain assessment and initial treatment among nursing staff working in adult surgical and medical wards of The Aga Khan University Hospital. The secondary objectives were to assess the impact of the educational course on the retention of knowledge and perceived change in clinical practices among nurses, three months later.
Methods: After the approval from the Institutional Ethical Review Committee, a hybrid education course was developed and then implemented for nursing staff working in adult medical and surgical wards of Aga Khan University Hospital. The educational course had two components, i. Online (web based on VLE) ii. Physical, face-to-face (hands on session). Evaluation method comprising of pre and post MCQ tests and assessment of clinical skill of all participants was done at the start of interactive session and at the end of session using PCIA and Epidural Likert scale. All participants were contacted three months after the course via email and were requested to take online MCQ test (same as post-test) to test their knowledge retention and complete online questionnaire to know perceived change in their clinical practice of pain assessment and initial treatment.
Results: Both pre-test and post-test MCQs were completed by 86 participants, of which 52 (60.5%) were female and 34(39.5%) were male. The overall gain in knowledge after the educational session was statistically significant (p=<0.001). Participants showed an overall 90.79% improvement in the skills of assessing patients using PCIA after attending the course. The participants showed overall 79.47% improvement in the skills of assessing patients receiving epidural analgesia after attending the course.
In the univariate analysis, the effect of educational courses was significantly higher in the male gender (p=0.041) and among participants less than 30 years of age (p=0.008).
Conclusion: The hybrid educational course showed statistically significant improvement and impact on the knowledge and clinical skills of the participants after attending the course. There was only 6.59% decline in overall knowledge of participants, three months after the educational course.
