None listed
Conditions
Brief summary
Health service often requires healthcare workers (typically doctors and nurses) to place a thin plastic tube into patients' veins called an intravenous cannula (IVC). Placing an IVC is one the most commonly performed medical procedures. It is estimated that every year 2 billion IVCs are sold around the world and over 7 million Australians have an IVC placed. Despite the huge numbers of IVCs placed each year, inexperienced clinicians often take many attempts to successfully place one. This causes pain for patients and, in an emergency, failure to rapidly place an IVC can cause serious patient harm including death. There are some recent realisations about how the shape of the IVC tip influences the proper approach to placing the IVC. If these realisations are effective at improving IVC success rates then this will impact on millions of people. This study will test this by randomly allocating students to watch different videos. Each video will contain helpful tips for the students to place IVCs but only some students will be shown novel details about the recent realisations. A subset of students will also learn a novel method of practicing a critical step of placing the IVC. Students will then report back the outcome of their first 20 IVC attempts. This will enable us to test if the realisations and the novel practice method lead to less failed IVC placement attempts. The research team will monitor the results using predefined stopping rules. We hypothesise that teaching the theory of lifting of needle tip will increase cannulation success rates. We further hypothesise that the using the hands-on alcohol wipe teaching model will have an additional benefit beyond purely theoretical instruction.
Interventions
Medical students, at the commencement of the study, will each watch one of three randomly allocated educational videos (each 10-20 minutes long) aiming to improve their ability to place intravenous cannulas. The videos will be supplied on-line with the expectation that they watch the video at least once. They will receive periodic (~6 monthly) email reminders of the key contents of the video. Compliance will only be monitored by a post video questionnaire. Students will be volunteers and expecte
Medical students, at the commencement of the study, will each watch one of three randomly allocated educational videos (each 10-20 minutes long) aiming to improve their ability to place intravenous cannulas. The videos will be supplied on-line with the expectation that they watch the video at least once. They will receive periodic (~6 monthly) email reminders of the key contents of the video. Compliance will only be monitored by a post video questionnaire. Students will be volunteers and expected to be reasonably compliant. The "control" video will just contain established tips for placing cannulas. The first "theory" group will receive additional instruction on the geometry of the cannula needle tip and how it is at risk of perforating the bottom (deep) layer of the vein but is virtually impossible to perforate the roof (superficial) layer once it has entered the lumen. The final group (theory plus practical) group will get futher instruction to practice the physical act of lifting the tip of the cannula by inserting a standard sharp drawing up needle on a 3ml syringe between the layers of an alcohol prep pad. These interventions are described here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FHtAO0bjNAdF9xzKzwxhcSQCODJAUtAe/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=107291495832032321355&rtpof=true&sd=true
Sponsors
University of Queensland
Study design
Allocation
Randomised controlled trial
Intervention model
Parallel
Primary purpose
Educational / counselling / training
Masking
Blinded (masking used) (Subject, Caregiver, Outcomes Assessor)
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
All
Age
18 Years to No maximum
Healthy volunteers
Yes
Inclusion criteria
Medical students entering their 3rd year of training
Exclusion criteria
Unwillingness to consent to participate and follow protocols.
Outcome results
None listed