Training pain management to nursing students: Designing, implementing, and evaluating a mobile‑based application

Pain is a common health issue and acute pain is the main problem for patients after surgery and injury. Inadequate and inappropriate management of pain is dangerous and costly for patients and leads to undesirable health effects. To overcome this problem, empowerment of the health‑care team, especially nurses, is essential. Today, to improve the quality of health‑care provision, various methods are used that e‑learning is one of them.

Based on the studies on pain management, existing parameters were extracted, and according to them, the educational content of the software was approved by nursing professors and anesthesiologists. The Unified Modeling Language diagrams were designed to provide a better understanding of the entities and the order in which the software operates. The software was implemented in the google android studio environment using Photoshop and JQuery mobile. Finally, the software was evaluated by using Questionnaire for User Interface Satisfaction. The software was evaluated by experts and students in two stages. The first stage was evaluated by eight anesthesiologists and nursing professors, and the second stage was evaluated with the participation of 55 undergraduate students and 28 M.Sc. nursing students.

The software was developed with two main modules of training and testing, and sections of the report, about us and exit, and four scenarios for the test section. In the initial evaluation of software by experts with an average of 91.85%, and in the second assessment of students, with a mean of 78.15%, application software was evaluated at a good level.

In order to teach academic and practical (clinical) materials to students, the use of digital teaching aids and e‑learning, along with traditional methods such as lectures, increases the students’ eagerness, and motivation to learn more and thereby enhance the level of learning and improving the quality of education.