Medication Safety in Older Adults: Learning From 2020 as We Launch into 2021

Older Adults With Complex Chronic Conditions Who Receive Care at Home: The Importance of Primary Care Assessment

The current study aimed to describe the characteristics of older adults with complex chronic conditions cared for at home. One hundred thirty-eight participants were recruited. Participants' average age was 85.9 years and 69.6% were female. Poly-pharmacy was present in 89.9% of participants. Participants who presented with polypharmacy had a worse self-perception of health (p = 0.002), and the worst fall rate. A total of 22.5% had experienced a fall during the past 6 months. Approximately one half of participants rated their self-perceived quality of life as bad or very bad. The percentage who used emergency services (54.3%) was greater than the percentage who needed to be admitted (43.5%). A worse self-perception of physical health was significantly associated with hospital admissions (p = 0.01). Geriatric assessment by nurses can provide information to improve care in situations in which frailty, dependency, and chronic conditions occur together. Obtaining information on the needs of individuals with frailty is important in designing successful nursing interventions. [Journal of Gerontological Nursing, 47(11), 31-38.].

Psychometric evaluation of medication safety competence scale for clinical nurses

BACKGROUND

Nurses are the most important members of the health care system for medication safety, there are few tools to evaluate their medication safety competence. This study aimed to translate the Medication Safety Competence Scale into Chinese and validate its reliability and validity among clinical nurses.

METHODS

A total of 894 clinical nurses were recruited from three cities in China. The original version of the Medication Safety Competence Scale was translated into Chinese using the backward and forward translation procedure. The reliability of the scale was measured by internal consistency, split-half reliability, and stability. The validity of the scale was assessed by the content validity index, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis.

RESULTS

The Cronbach's coefficient of the scale was 0.940, and the coefficient values for the six domains ranged between 0.843 and 0.948. The split-half reliability and stability were 0.671 and 0.703, respectively. The content validity index of the scale was 0.952. The 6-factor structure, supported by the eigenvalues, total variance explained, and scree plot accounted for 71.485 % of the total variance. Moreover, as a result of the confirmatory factor analysis, the average variance extracted values were 0.55 to 0.70, and the model fitting indexes were all in the acceptable range.

CONCLUSIONS

The Chinese version of the Medication Safety Competence Scale had ideal reliability and validity among clinical nurses. The evaluation results of the scale can provide a reference for nursing managers to formulate education plans and intervention measures to improve clinical nurses' safe medication competence.