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From the desk of Adrianne E. Avillion, DEd, RN

Staff Development Weekly: Insight on Evidence-Based Practice in Education, December 30, 2011

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Editor’s note: This feature is written by nursing professional development expert Adrianne E. Avillion, DEd, RN. Each week, Adrianne writes about an important issue in the area of professional development or answers reader questions. If you have a question for Adrianne, e-mail her at adrianne1@comcast.net.

Dealing with requests for remediation education

Most, if not all, NPD specialists have had to deal with requests for remediation education, which may or may not be appropriate. One of the most common examples of an inappropriate request is for remediation pertaining to medication errors. Errors are often made not because of a lack of knowledge, but because of a system or process issue. However, a knee-jerk reaction on the part of management or administration is often to turn to education as a quick fix for the problem. 

You may be able to use data to show that process is the issue. However, just as often, you may receive mandates to provide remediation. Rather than allow these kinds of situations to frustrate you, prepare for them in advance. Becoming frustrated only leads to a waste of time and energy. Here are some ideas for advance preparation: 

• Identify the most common and/or frequent requests for remediation. Once you have accomplished this, you can prepare specific, short, concise remediation programs.
• Prepare a template for remediation. Such a template should include topic, learning objectives, a means for evaluating knowledge acquisition, and a means for documenting achievement of objectives. Once you have a template, complete a template for each commonly identified requests for remediation. For example, for medication remediation you can include the five rights, a brief review of the steps of proper medication administration, and data pertaining to the most common reasons for medication errors. To help the learner, include a listing of easily accessible resources to quickly identify drugs, doses, actions, and side effects.
• Work with nurse managers to develop these templates as well as a mechanism for tracking the circumstances surrounding errors and/or lack of knowledge. By tracking such circumstances you might be able to help identify the process or systems problems that contribute to problems.
• Work with quality improvement and risk management committees to keep abreast of problems and how education can help alleviate such problems.
• Work with shared governance committees appropriate to identifying process and systems issues and how to correct them.

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