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

INTRODUCTION: 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. METHODS: 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. RESULTS: 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. CONCLUSION: 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.