Medication Safety Education: Data Collection and Analysis Plan

Introduction and Project Overview

The proposed project seeks to implement a mandatory medication safety education program for clinical staff at the selected site. The project addresses the high incidence of medication errors at the clinical site by improving participants' knowledge and attitudes toward medication errors. The education program will begin with nurses and will be rolled out to physicians and pharmacists if found to be effective.

As part of assessing the project's success, the project team will carry out a pre- and post-intervention evaluation that involves comparing staff knowledge and attitudes about medication safety before and after the intervention. This paper details the data collection and analysis techniques the project team plans to use to evaluate the project.

The project evaluation will involve two phases. The first phase will assess how participants' knowledge and attitudes toward medication errors and medication safety change as a result of the education program. The second phase will compare the incidence of medication errors in the year of project implementation against past years to determine whether a notable change has occurred.

Data Collection and Questionnaire Design

Data for the first phase of evaluation will be collected using a questionnaire administered online via the SurveyMonkey platform. The questionnaire includes knowledge-based, attitude-based, and practice-related questions (Meher et al., 2015). The ten knowledge-based questions assess general knowledge about medication errors and medication safety practices, including what constitutes a medication error, causes of medication errors, who can report medication errors, and the rights of medication administration.

The seven attitude-based questions assess attitudes toward medication errors, including what one thinks about reporting errors, whether one believes reporting is beneficial, and what role nurses could play in reporting. Finally, the four practice questions assess what participants have encountered in their practice — for example, whether they have witnessed a medication error and whether they have played a role in reporting errors.

The questionnaire was adapted from the study by Meher et al. (2015), which sought to assess knowledge, practice, and attitudes toward pharmacovigilance among undergraduate medical students in an Indian hospital. The clinical staff will receive the questionnaire one week before the start of the education program and will be required to indicate their agreement to the consent provisions, complete the questionnaire, and submit it within five days. The same questionnaire will be administered immediately after the completion of the education program.

Scoring System and Analysis Methods

Responses will be scored as follows: correct answers for each item will receive a score of 1, while incorrect answers and non-responses will receive a score of 0. The total possible scores will be 10, 7, and 4 for knowledge-based, attitude-based, and practice questions, respectively. Total scores below 50% will be graded as poor performance; scores between 50% and 69% will be graded as average; and scores above 70% will be graded as good performance.

The responses collected before and after the education program will be entered into an MS Excel spreadsheet and analyzed using SPSS through descriptive statistics, chi-square tests, and analysis of variance (ANOVA). These statistical methods will allow the project team to identify statistically significant differences in knowledge and attitude scores before and after the intervention.

To test the functionality and relevance of the questionnaire, the instrument was piloted among a group of nursing students. The findings of the pilot study showed that the questionnaire and the adopted scoring system were functional and relevant. The project team therefore concludes that the instrument is valid and measures what it was intended to measure.