Paper
Thursday, 20 July 2006
This presentation is part of : Best Practices in Nursing Education
Enhance Level of English Medical Terminology Comprehension by Nursing Education
Heng-Hsin Tung, MSN, FNP, University of San Diego , Tungs' Taichung MetroHarbor Hospital, Irvine, CA, USA
Learning Objective #1: The learner will be able to increase the awareness of importance of medical terminology comprehension in clinical setting.
Learning Objective #2: The learner will be able to understand how to help the nurses enhancing their level of importance of medical terminology comprehension

Medical terminology is essential for nursing education and clinical practice. However, medical terminology is not a required course in many professional nursing programs. A pre –post quasi-experimental design with one-hour lecture intervention was conducted to investigate the level of English medical terminology comprehension among nurses of one teaching hospital. One hundred and forty four nurses were sampled. Comprehension of English medical terminology was measure by medical terminology test sheet developed by the authors. Descriptive statistic, t-test and MANOVA were used to analysis the data. The result showed that the nurses have a limited understanding of English medical terminology. The study found that after one-hour medical terminology lecture the nurses earned significantly higher score than before the education intervention (p=0.00). This study also indicated more year of working experience is significantly associated higher level of medical terminology comprehension, however, level of medical terminology comprehension decreased year by year for the nurses with over 10 year working experience. In addition, the nurses who work in ER and physical examination unit obtain higher level of medical terminology comprehension than other units. The findings suggested that there is a need to standardize and embrace the medical terminology course in continue education program.

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