Aim and Significance of the Study

This article discusses the aim and significance of two studies on preventing medical administration errors and reducing medical errors in nursing practice. The first study explores the experiences of nurses in preventing medical administration errors, while the second study focuses on the role of workplace support and relationships in improving medical practice and reducing errors. The article also discusses the research design, sampling technique, data collection method, and data analysis used in each study.

Guided questions Answer Template
Guided Question Qualitative Study Quantitative Study
1. Aim and Significance (5
marks 200 words)
a. What was the aim and
significance of the study?
Smeulers, Onderwater, Zwieten & Vermeulen
(2014) were seeking to explore the experiences
of nurses to determine their perspectives on
how to prevent medical administration errors.
In research, a good study is the one that makes
it easy for the reader to identify the aim and
significance from the introduction. This study
was thus aimed at understanding how errors
can be reduced by the nurse since nurses are
the ones who are in charge of administering
medications. Further, the significance of this
study is to determine and recommend ways in
which nurses can reduce and address medical
administration errors.
The Sahaya, Hutchinson, & East (2015) study
sought to understand how workplace support
and relationships create an environment for
improving medical practice and reducing
medical errors. Thus its significance was to
understand how support relationships that
graduate nurses have with other professionals
are important in reducing medical errors. By
measuring the attitudes and perceptions of the
graduate nurses on how the clinical
relationships support their work, the study was
designed to understand how such factors affect
the health profession by either increasing or
reducing medical errors. According to
Shaughnessy, Zechmeister & Jeanne (2011) the
grand research approach, a good study needs to
have a significance to the industry that it
belongs to by having a significance that throws
weight to the existing research or opens avenues
for new research.
2. Methods (10 marks 700
words)
a. Identify the
research design used
in the study and was
it appropriate for the
issue discussed?
The researchers used the qualitative
exploratory study design to carry out the
research. This type of design offers many
advantages since in most cases, researchers
work with the respondents when collecting
The researchers used both exploratory and
descriptive to allow the researcher explore all
the variables for the study. When the variables
involved in a study are many the researcher can
combine two quantitative research designs thus

information from them. In most cases,
qualitative study methods require a good design
that allows gathering of appropriate data for the
study (Gelling, 2014). Further, the case study
fits most qualitative research because it allows
gathering of data and analysing as the study
continues. This allowed the researcher to
collect the data from the sample population so
that the findings of the study can be
generalised.
allowing contextual understanding and the
design of the hypothesis for the study. The
exploratory study works as the groundwork
through which the researcher uses to measure
the association between different variables in
the study (Donald & White, 2014). For
example, the variables being studied are
medical errors and nursing relationships. Then
the role of the descriptive study is to measure
the associations between the different variables
in the study problem. This type of research
design is fit for this study since the combination
of the two methods offers the best quantitative
results for the study.
b. Discuss the sampling
technique, inclusion and
exclusion criteria used for the
selection of sample in the study
Since the research was not based on a big
population but rather a selected group of
respondents. Then we can argue that both
purposive and snowball sampling were used for
the study. At first purposive sampling was used
to choose the study population of the
respondents that were chosen for the study.
This means that only nurses were purposively
chosen. On the other hand, snow ball sampling
was used to recruit the participants into the
study group where an email was send to them
and those who agreed were entered into the
study group (Voicu,2011).. This means that any
registered nurse qualified to be included in the
study. After that, semi-structured interviews
were used to carry out the research through
interviewing the participants. Snow ball
sampling is easy to apply since the researcher
The requirement for inclusion in this study was
a recent graduate in any of the three schools of
nursing in Australia. Emails for the students
were obtained from the university database and
a survey link send to the graduates requesting
them to participate in the study. Those
interested respondent to the link and were
directed to a survey form where they answered
a set of questions. The sample frame obtained
for this study was purposively sampled since
the researchers were concerned about a specific
study group rather than the whole population. A
sample of 50 respondents was obtained from the
study where the data collected from them was
analysed.

recruits the participants for the study on a
rolling basis until the required threshold has
been met.
c. Explore the data collection
method and its appropriateness
to the research design of the
study
Semi-structured interviews were used in this
process since they offer the best research tool
for qualitative research. Here Megan, Ranne,
Garro, Sasson & Morrow (2016) suggests that
the researcher has the freedom of interviewing
the respondents in a semi-structured way
making it easy to explore and follow any links
that are helpful for the study. After the
interview, the researchers allowed each
participant to reflect on their nursing
professionalism thus allowing the researchers
to verify some areas and sometimes verify
some insights from the respondents. By
following the verbal and non-verbal cues, the
researcher is able to gather more information
that may not be gathered in other conventional
tools like questionnaires. Such questions need
to be carefully structured and then a good
interviewer used to carry out the research.
A survey questionnaire was used to gather data
for the study through a link that was via email
and the student’s respondent to the
questionnaire which was hosted by Qualtrics®
an online platform in the university. The survey
questionnaire is appropriate for gathering
information from a large number of people.
Through questions that were designed using a
Likert scale, the respondents were asked to offer
their opinions, attitudes or perception about
certain aspects of the research problem. Thus
they were assessed on the level to which they
agree or disagree with the issues that were
asked (Donald & White, 2014). This methods
makes it easy for quantitative analysis since the
responses are entered into SPSS a computer
program for statistical analysis and then
presented through measures of distribution.
Thus the survey is the best method for the study
since it allows collection of quantitative data
that is easy for analysis.
3. Data analysis and results
(10 marks 600 words)
a. How was the data
analysed and was it
appropriate for the
study?
The interview data was analyse parallel with
the interview process through coding and
comparing the data to develop a consensus tree
for the study. Relevant themes that were
obtained from the study were identified and
compared with previous study findings to
The SPSS computer program was used for
analysis by entering the data in the program and
assessing the completeness of the survey
through removing the incomplete data to allow
easy analysis. To analyse and present the data,
measures of frequency distribution were used to

determine the relatedness with the previous
studies. The findings have to be relate with
other studied to determine if they are consistent
with the current findings or not.
analyse and present the data since they offer the
best way for presenting quantitative data
(Weathington, Cunningham & Pittenger, 2015).
Descriptive statistics offer the best framework
to analyse quantitative data since by looking at
the frequency distribution, it becomes easy to
understand how the data is presented on
different variables (Bryman, 2015). Thus
frequency distributions make it easy to analyse
the data through assessing the views opinions,
and feelings of the respondents about the topic.
b.What were the
findings/results of the study?
The findings of the study indicate that nurses
are in a better position to reduce medical errors
since they are the ones that who administer
medications to patients and thus if they
concentrate well, they can be able to increase
the efficiency of work by ensuring that
medications are properly administered. From
the study, the researchers reported that nurses
understand that they play a pivotal role in
reducing medical errors through increased
medical safety. Through clinical reasoning the
nurses can reduce medical errors since the
accuracy of their work is achieved. Further, the
level of support that the nurses receive from
other professionals leads to improved decision
making because when combined with the
knowledge that they have gathered in their
practice, the errors can be reduced thus leading
to increased decision making and accuracy of
administration.
From the study, the most factors that was found
to affect relationships was intimidation and
bullying which made the nurses to doubt their
abilities thus increasing the medical errors that
arise from the challenges that they face. The
study also found that when the relationships are
not well, documentation is a problem as seen
from the fact that most nurses failed to fill the
RN check form S8 when working with patients.
Despite lacking knowledge on how to fill the
form, most nurses were reluctant to seek
assistance from other practitioners when the
relationship that they had with them was bad. In
addition to that, documentation of other patient
information was not done and in some cases
shift information was transferred to other nurses
via mouth rather than through a documented
record. The study also reported that two thirds
of medical errors could be reduced through
development of proper relationships between

professionals thus increasing patient outcomes.
The most common errors that were reported
were wrong timing, wrong dosage, wrong drug,
and wrong patient and wrong route of
administration. The findings of the study further
indicated that only 32.8 documented the errors
while 24.1 and 20.7 reported to the IMS and
medical officer respectively. From the study,
the researchers concluded that nursing
relationships with other professionals are
important in reducing the medical errors that
they face.
Discuss the limitations and
recommendations of the study?
The major limitation of this study is the number
of participants that were interviewed which
seemed to be too low to allow the findings of
the study to be generalised to the industry. This
means that the confidence level of the study
was low since the participants were not
sampled from the whole population making it
difficult to establish a correct sampling frame
(Donald, & White, 2014)..
Thus the researchers were not sure if the same
study if repeated will produce the same results.
To address the challenge of medical errors, the
researchers concluded that there is need for
nursing managers and professionals to develop
support mechanisms for the profession for
reducing the medical errors. Other measures
like ensuring proper workloads for nurses can
reduce the medical errors since they allow the
application of the reasoning cycle.
This study relied on the emails in the school
database to reach out to the graduate nurses
which led to limited responses. This limitation
means that the respondents that were used in the
sample were very few casting a doubt on the
confidence level and the reliability of the study.
The researchers only based their study on the
nurses who responded to the emails which does
not reflect a general view of the whole
population.
Generalizability of this study becomes
challenging since it makes it difficult to carry
out this measures. Further, we cannot ascertain
the minimum number of the respondents that
should have been used in this study since the
population size cannot be ascertained to
determine the number of respondents who
received the emails.
This research therefore recommended the need

In the grand research method, Goodwin (2015)
argues that a good study is supposed to offer
grounds for future research by linking the
current findings to the previous studies and at
the same time providing direction for future
research through recommendations for future
research and gaps that need to be filled.
for a wide scale research to validate and
generalise the findings of these study.

References
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sahaya, A., Hutchinson, M., & East, L. (2015). Exploring the influence of workplace
supports and relationships on safe medication practice: A pilot study of Australian
graduate nurses. Nurse Education, 35(2).
Smeulers, M., Onderwater, A. T., Zwieten, M. C., & Vermeulen, H. (2014). Nurses'
experiences and perspectives on medication safety practices: an explorative
qualitative study. Journal of nursing management, 22(3), 276-285.
Weathington, B., Cunningham, C., & Pittenger, D. (2015). Research Methods for the
Behavioral and Social Sciences. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.