Educating Intensive Care Nurses in Pressure Injury Staging by Using Analogy: A Quasi-experimental Study.

Objective: To evaluate the effect of training on pressure injury (PI) staging provided to intensive care nurses with two different teaching techniques: a traditional teaching method and the analogy-based technique.

Methods: The sample of this pretest/posttest, quasi-experimental study consisted of 60 intensive care nurses from a university hospital. Using the stratified randomization method, nurses were divided into two groups as traditional (n = 30) and intervention (n = 30) groups. Training on PI staging was given to the traditional group using a traditional teaching technique and to the intervention group using analogy-based teaching. For both groups, the pretest was administered before training, the posttest was administered immediately after the training, and the retention test was administered 4 weeks later. Data were analyzed by Mann-Whitney U test, two-way mixed analysis of variance, and Pearson correlation analysis.

Results: The mean pretest score of the intervention group (7.97 ± 3.25) was significantly lower than the mean pretest score of the traditional group (12.30 ± 3.16; P < .001). After the training, the mean posttest score of the intervention group (15.27 ± 2.15) was significantly higher than the mean posttest score of the traditional group (12.43 ± 2.21; P < .001). Further, the mean retention test score of the intervention group (13.73 ± 3.69) was significantly higher than the posttest mean score of the traditional group (11.90 ± 3.03; P = .04).

Conclusions: Pressure injury staging training with the analogy-based teaching method resulted in significantly better posttest and retention scores compared with the training using a traditional teaching method. The authors recommend the use of analogy-based teaching method for nurse training in the staging of PIs.