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E-books No Substitute for Nursing Central™ [Case Study]

Sinclair Community College

The Client

Sinclair Community College, located in southwest Ohio, currently uses Nursing Central in their ADN program.

The Challenge

Sinclair Community College was a longtime user of Unbound Medicine’s best-selling nursing app, Nursing Central, but in 2015 the school adopted a textbook bundled with incorporated e-book editions. After organizing a new curriculum, it was estimated that the e-books would function as well as the Nursing Central app and decided to cancel their subscription to Nursing Central.

The Results

As the school year progressed, many students and faculty voiced their concerns about the resources and e-books in their new textbook bundle. A few of their outstanding issues included:

• Searchability: Both students and faculty felt that searching for information in their new e-books was far less fluid than with the Nursing Central app. Students reported that they missed the option to search within all of the resources simultaneously— an option available in Nursing Central’s Universal Search function. They also missed Cross Links, which immediately connects students to interrelated information throughout Nursing Central’s resources.
• Immediate access to unfamiliar terms: Students learning unfamiliar medical terminology no longer enjoyed quick access to medical definitions.
• Trusted Content: While many students and faculty believe that clinical content such as drug guides and dictionaries are interchangeable, students strongly preferred Davis’s Drug Guide and Taber’s Medical Dictionary.
• Integrated Tools: Students missed integrated tools such as calculators and in-text lookup (Glimpse) that helped make them more efficient.

Nursing Central left such an impression on one instructor that she purchased a personal account. She would often share Nursing Central’s resources and tools with her students when the adopted e-books came up short.

The Solution

Bring back Nursing Central! It was clear to many that Nursing Central had been an essential part of the student learning process at Sinclair. To more accurately assess the need to readopt Nursing Central, it was necessary to measure student and instructor satisfaction of the product. A pilot study was conducted giving Nursing Central access to a cross-section of students and instructors who participated for four weeks. According to one faculty member, she and fellow faculty were “ecstatic.” They value having up-to-date drug information to keep their students at the forefront of care and in a format that makes teaching drug information more manageable. Also, faculty have acknowledged that students appear more confident in the classroom, clinical, and labs. Instructor Annie Yarnall, who lead the study, commented, “They’re [students are] not quite as fearful when they want to answer a question in class.” The pilot study concluded that students overwhelmingly preferred learning with Nursing Central. Students were enthusiastic about the drug guide. They appreciated having the most up-to-date information and integrated calculators. They also raved about how much easier it was to search for necessary information in Nursing Central. By typing in just a few letters, they could easily access essential records. Using Cross Links, they could access all of the interrelated information from each Nursing Central resource.

The Conclusion

Faculty and students were pleased to have their Nursing Central returned finally!

Printable Case Study

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