Medication administration is an important and essential nursing function with the potential for dangerous consequences if errors occur. Not only must nurses understand the use and outcomes of administering medications they must be able to calculate correct dosages. Medication administration and dosage calculation education occurs across the undergraduate programs for student nurses. Research highlights inconsistencies in the approaches used by academics to enhance the student nurse’s medication calculation abilities. The aim of this integrative review was to examine the literature available on effective education strategies for undergraduate student nurses on medication dosage calculations. A literature search of five health care databases: Sciencedirect, Cinahl, Pubmed, Proquest, Medline to identify journal articles between 1990 and 2012 was conducted. Research articles on medication calculation educational strategies were considered for inclusion in this review. The search yielded 266 papers of which 20 meet the inclusion criteria. A total of 5206 student nurses were included in the final review. This review revealed educational strategies fell into four types of strategies; traditional pedagogy, technology, psychomotor skills and blended learning. The results suggested student nurses showed some benefit from the different strategies; however more improvements could be made. More rigorous research into this area is needed.

Denne systematiske oversikten er utarbeidet på en god måte og forfatteren har vært tydelig på metoden som er brukt for å utarbeide oversikten. Målet med artikkelen er å gi en oversikt over forskningen som er gjort på temaet. Forfatteren gjør også en metodisk vurdering av forskningen som en del av analysen og diskusjonen av artiklene.