Administration of medicines in pediatrics/neonatology: learning through a virtual learning environment (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Worldwide, patient safety has been a widely discussed topic and has currently become one of the greatest challenges for health institutions. This concern is heightened when referring to children. OBJECTIVE The goal of this study was to develop a virtual learning environment for medication administration, as a tool to facilitate the training process of undergraduate nursing students. METHODS Descriptive research and methodological development with a quantitative and qualitative approach were used with stages of design-based research as methodological strategies. For the development of the virtual environment, 5 themes were selected: rights of medication administration, medication administration steps, medication administration routes, medication calculation, and nonpharmacological actions for pain relief. After development, 2 groups-expert judges in the field of pediatrics and neonatology for environment validation and undergraduate nursing students for the assessment-were used to assess the virtual learning environment. For the validation of the virtual learning environment by expert judges, the content validity index was used, and for the evaluation of the students, the percentage of agreement was calculated. RESULTS The study included 13 experts who positively validated the virtual environment with a content validity index of 0.97, and 26 students who considered the content suitable for nursing students, although some adjustments are necessary. CONCLUSIONS The results show the benefit of the virtual learning environment to the training of nursing students and professional nurses who work in health care. It is an effective educational tool for teaching medication administration in pediatrics and neonatology and converges with the conjectures of active methodologies.