American registered nurse medical device education: a comparison of simple and complex devices.

Registered nurses (N = 106) working at a 500-bed tertiary care center in a medium-sized midwestern city on units with high levels of usage of both indwelling urethral (Foley) catheters and intravenous infusion pumps were surveyed to compare how and what they had learned about the simple compared with the complex devices they used in direct patient care, and the consequences of simple vs complex device use for both patients and staff nurses. The participants were significantly more likely to have learned to use the indwelling urethral catheter in nursing school than they were to have learned how to use an intravenous infusion pump in nursing school. Staff nurses differed significantly on most (12 of 17) items about what they had learned and were more likely to have learned about various features of the indwelling urethral catheter than about the infusion pump. The participants were significantly more likely to feel stressed when using an intravenous infusion pump than when using an indwelling urethral catheter, but were significantly more likely to have used an indwelling urethral catheter that caused a patient harm than an intravenous infusion pump that caused a patient harm.