Development of educational content for nurses to prevent safety accidents of hospitalized children: Delphi approach

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to develop content for safety education to prevent hospital safety accidents among hospitalized children and to investigate the status of safety education performed by nurses. Methods: First, the Delphi method was used, with 18 experts, to develop educational contents for preventing safety accidents. Second, an exploratory survey was performed of the actual status of safety education for preventing safety accidents among hospitalized children using a questionnaire developed based on the Delphi method. The participants of this study were 159 nurses with at least 6 months of work experience. Results: The educational content developed through the Delphi method for preventing safety accidents among hospitalized children contained seven domains (falls, injury, electric shocks/burns, suffocation/aspiration, poisoning/abuse, kidnapping, medical devices) with 44 topics. The item mean of nurses'perceptions of the importance of child safety education was 4.18, and the actual performance score was 3.72, which was a statistically significant difference (t=11.58, p < .001). Conclusion: These seven comprehensive domains of accident prevention education for hospitalized children are expected to be useful for interventions to support the safety of hospitalized children.