An Evaluation of Videos used to Support Clinical Skills Teaching for Pre-registration Student Nurses

The NMC suggest that to ensure high quality patient care it is essential that student nurses develop competence in a range of clinical skills (NMC, 2010a). The aim of this project was to determine whether nursing students perform the skills of infection prevention; hand washing; aseptic technique and vital signs measurement more competently in an Observed Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE), when traditional face-to-face teaching is enhanced with the availability of skills videos via an e-learning platform. The study employed a randomised controlled design. An intervention group were taught face-to-face in the clinical skills lab and had the teaching supplemented by access to clinical skills videos. The control group received the same classroom face-to-face teaching but did not have access to the videoed blended e-learning resources. Student nurses of mixed gender and ages (n=229) were invited to volunteer to participate in the inhouse study. Eighty-eight students consented and were evenly divided by random allocation to the intervention group (n=44) and to the control group (n=44). The mean score for all clinical skills was higher in the OSCEs in the intervention group who viewed the videos, this was not, however, statistically significant as the results were >.05.