Essential Skills comprises a highly interactive, visual and self-paced learning environment designed by experienced nurse educators and clinical pharmacists. It is designed to develop and assess the competencies required for safe medication dosage calculation at the point of registration.

Essential Skills can be used to replace traditional methods of teaching and assessing medication dosage calculation skills and locates seamlessly within a typical pre-registration curriculum. The integrated assessment features provide a platform for formative or summative assessments with automated and detailed diagnostic feedback on performance for the individual user and institution.

Essential Skills is available as a 30-day or 1-year option for healthcare providers and up to 3 years for higher education institutions.

Institution wide assessment and reporting features are not available as part of Essential Skills Lite.

Included Modules:

Medication Dosage Calculation Skills

The administration of medicines is an important aspect of what registered healthcare practitioners do in clinical practice. To be able to administer medicines safely, healthcare practitioners must possess key knowledge and skills. The mastery of these skills requires the ability to understand the medication dosage or IV infusion-rate problem the learner is attempting to solve, and the ability to perform some simple arithmetic.

Essential Skills assists learners to:

• Understand the essential clinical features of dosage & rate problems.
• Recall and develop the computation skills required to accurately calculate dosages and IV infusion rates.
• Practice at their own pace and continually assess and evaluate their learning and understanding. Practice questions can be attempted after each module, which are drawn randomly from our database.

Learners will work through 6 sections that combine to provide the understanding and skills required to safely and accurately perform medication dosage calculations in clinical practice:

• Introduction
• Prescriptions and SI Units
• Tablets and Capsules
• Liquid Medicines
• Injections
• IV Infusions

Practice diagnostic assessments are available after each key section with questions drawn randomly from our extensive database of dosage problems.

Authentic Diagnostic Assessment

The Authentic Diagnostic Assessment (ADA) module provides a platform for institution-wide assessment and reporting. Users are assessed on their conceptual competence (how to accurately set up dosage problems in an appropriate equation), calculation competence (how to accurately calculate a numeric answer) and technical measurement competence (how to accurately represent the numeric answer using a medication delivery vehicle). Full error diagnosis and diagnostic feedback assists the learner to remedy any identified skill deficit. Assessments simulate real world environments that students and practitioners will be exposed to in clinical practice providing a unique and unparalleled mechanism for establishing a national and international education and diagnostic assessment facility.

User Features:

• Authentic simulation of clinical practice
• Opportunity for repeated practice attempts
• Immediate detailed diagnostic assessment and feedback
• 150 point final assessment specific to broad area of practice
• Personal record detailing performance and dosage calculation skill level

Administrator Features:

• Extensive medication dosage problem database
• Set up assessment events for pre-determined dates and times
• Password protect assessment events to control student access
• Powerful reporting tools at the individual, group or cohort levels
• Instant performance analysis in tabular and graphical formats
• Hard copy reports
• Data export features

Authentic Assessment

With a design informed by a 3-year programme of research commissioned by NHS Education for Scotland (NES), our Authentic Assessment (AA) module takes one step closer again to the reality of medication dosage problem solving in practice.

AA can be used as a ‘point of registration’ assessment of cognitive competence for final year students of nursing or midwifery. In addition, NHS or private healthcare providers may wish to use AA for pre-employment testing or in an audit capacity to periodically assess the competence of registered practitioners. AA makes it easy to swiftly and accurately verify dosage calculation competencies and identify those staff requiring further training and support.