The effect of medical material management system app on nursing workload and stress

AIMS: To develop a clinical medical material management App for nurses, in order to reduce their workload and improve the efficacy of medical material management. DESIGN: The single-group pre- and post-test experimental design was adopted. METHODS: The subjects were nurses in the intensive care units of a regional hospital in Hsinchu City enrolled by purposive sampling. Single-group pre-tests and post-tests were conducted. The research period was from November 2019 to March 2020. The workload, stress, and information acceptance of 57 nurses before and after the intervention of the Medical Equipment App were collected. The research tools included a structured questionnaire, which includes open questions that cover the aspects of workload, stress, and information acceptance intention of nurses, as well as a demographic questionnaire, which collects the basic personal data, including gender, age, years of service, educational level, nursing ability level, use ability of IT products, and unit type. The results were analyzed and compared using SPSS, APP Inventor, and data mining modeling to determine the effects of the App. RESULTS: After employing the Shift Check App, the average workload of nurses was effectively reduced, in particular, the workload reduction of the N1 level nursing ability was greater than that of N2. In addition to satisfaction, the scores of information acceptance intention in all aspects, including behavioral intention, technology use intention, and contributing factors, all increased. CONCLUSION: The use of information technology products to assist medical material management in clinical practice has a significant effect on the load reduction of nurses and improvement of satisfaction. CLINICAL RELEVANCE: The App developed in this study can improve nurses’ work satisfaction, quality of care and workload reduction.