Application of clinical pathway combined with drawing method in clinical teaching of cardiac surgery nursing

Background Nursing internship is the terminal course in nursing education. However, the long-standing nursing teaching evolves with obvious disadvantages: boring methods, lack of live Demo and unstandardized contents. Therefore, a novel method is urgently in need. Methods In this study, a total of 74 nursing interns rotating in Cardiac Surgery ward of Large Vessel, Cardiac Surgery Department, were included. Of them, 37 included from July 2016 to March 2017 were distributed to the control group trained by the traditional method; while the rest 37 included from July 2017 to March 2018 were distributed to the study group receiving a novel teaching method characteristic of using clinical pathway and drawing. Baseline characteristics such as gender, age, graduation school were matched. Both groups had an internship for 4 weeks and each subject was taught by experienced instructors like nurse practitioner or nurse-in-charge. Comprehensive assessment,including growth assessment of specialty knowledge and examinations of both theory and operation,were applied both in the beginning and by the end of the internship. Results In the growth assessment of specialty knowledge, the study group performed significantly better than the control group in both total score and sub-section score(specialty pharmacy and specialty operation). In the final examination, the study group had a higher score in specialty operation than the control group, which was statistically significant. Conclusions Application of clinical pathway combined with drawing method significantly improves the quality of cardiac surgery nursing teaching.