On Pills and Needles: Students’ and Clinical Nursing Faculty’s Lived Experience of a Nursing Student’s First Med Pass in the Clinical Setting

Abstract

Learning and teaching medication administration is a substantial component of prelicensure nursing education. The emphasis of the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses initiative is to prepare nursing students to provide safe, quality care. Medication administration, which falls under this initiative, is a challenge for nursing students to learn and for clinical nursing faculty to teach. Consequently, nursing students graduate feeling unprepared to administer medications in their practice. This issue is prevalent and long-standing within nursing education. Most of the research studies conducted, though, are from senior nursing students and nurses. There is little research from the beginner nursing student when first learning this skill and the faculty supervising them. Without an understanding of nursing students’ first experiences in medication administration and how faculty promote this clinical competency, strategies designed to prepare them for subsequent clinical and support them may be incongruent with their needs.

This study used a phenomenological design to illuminate the lived experience of beginner nursing students’ first medication administration in the clinical setting from the student and faculty perspectives. Six nurses were interviewed about their student experience, and six faculty were interviewed about their experience with teaching and supervising beginner nursing students. Both groups’ experiences of this phenomenon contrasted and converged, as evidenced through their compelling stories. Using van Manen’s phenomenological method and Merleau-Ponty’s intersubjectivity, five essential themes emerged: (a) A Transformative Experience, (b) Unprepared for Complexities in the Clinical Environment, (c) Overcoming Fear Through Self-Reassurance and Faculty Support, (d) The Rubber Meets the Road: Administering Medications in the Actual Clinical Setting, and (e) Reaping the Rewards. The findings from this study will contribute to nursing education’s body of knowledge and benefit nursing professors and clinical nursing faculty who prepare beginner nursing students and supervise them administering medications in the clinical setting.