One of the most significant challenges that nursing students are facing is the lack of experience with an electronic medical record (EMR), which can affect the quality and safety in their performance as to future nursing professionals. Nokes et al. (2015) stated that with the introduction of the EMR, nursing students do not have full access to the document in the EMR, so their practice is limited. This poor access to EMR weakens the development of the documentation skill needed for the quality of services in health care, sending unprepared professionals to the workplace. According to many researchers such as Chung and Cho (2017), hands-on education in topics such as electronic medical record increases Self-Efficacy of senior nursing students. Titzer, Swenty, and Mustata (2015) stated the need to increase strategies to develop informatics skills in electronic health records in nursing students and other health disciplines to assure safety and quality of services. Lack of adequate training and competency in using EMR for nursing can threaten patient safety and increase medical complications (Mountain, Redd, O'leary & Giles, 2015).
The researcher used Bandura’s Self-Efficacy Theory (1977) who proposed that the objective of all intervention should be aimed at reinforcing self-efficacy. Also, Bandura (1977) stated that the greater the sense of security, the more people will be motivated and persist in the achievement of their goals.
Purpose:
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of an educational electronic medical record program on self-efficacy in electronic documentation among senior nursing students.
Methods:
This is quantitative, quasi-experimental research employed a one group pre-test and post-test comparison.The researcher used the Spanish adaptation of the General Self-Efficacy Scale (Schwarzer and Jerusalem,1995). The benefits of the instrument is that take just three to five minutes to be completed, allows for an easy interpretation and has high internal reliability between alpha .75 and .91. For this research, the Cronbach alpha was .95.
Results:
A Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test revealed a statistically significant increment in Self-Efficacy levels following participation in the EEMR program, z = -5.014, p < .001 with a large effect size (r = .57). An educational electronic medical record (EEMR) program increased Self-Efficacy on electronic documentation of senior nursing students after 10 hours of educational intervention.
Conclusion:
As a conclusion, nursing schools and educational centers need to develop strategies to implement the inclusion of EEMR to send prepared nurses to the nursing workforce.