Indirect Evaluation of Nurse’s Transfer Skill Through the Measurement of Patient

Abstract

Nowadays with the advancement of technology, many evaluation systems have been developed for skill learning. However, those systems are inevitable to set the sensors on trainees or environment (e.g. camera). Therefore this study aims to propose a method to indirectly evaluate the patient transfer skill through only measuring the patient, instead of the nurse. Based on the observation of the patient’s movements during transfer, joint angle and acceleration of patient are determined as two parameters to evaluate the nurse’s skill. Incorrect ways of transfer skill were added into a checklist, proposed in our pre-work, based on clinical experience of nursing teachers. An experiment was conducted by two nursing teachers, and they were asked to carry out the patient transfer skill through both correct and incorrect ways as proposed in the checklist. The results exhibit those two parameters enable to show the difference while the nurses carried out the incorrect way. The angles of hip and knee joints enable to reveal the difference in the steps related to standing up and sitting down; while the acceleration of patient can exhibit the difference of patient’s dynamic movement. According to such results, the indirect evaluation became practical for the future works.