The investigation of medication errors in nursing includes both methodological and ethical considerations because it is a sensitive field of research.
Purpose
To present an original research protocol for the investigation of nurses’ experiences of medication errors with interpretative phenomenological analysis and the relevant methodological and ethical considerations.
Methods
A discursive paper which presents an original research protocol about nurses’ experiences of medication errors with interpretative phenomenological analysis followed by a literature review and personal reflections about the relevant methodological and ethical considerations. The review included papers published in English from 1990 to February 2019 on PubMed, BNI (British Nursing Index), CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Allied Health Literature), ScienceDirect, and Wiley Online Library.
Results
The following methodological considerations were identified: recruitment of participants, data collection, and data analysis, and the ethical considerations included researcher’s morality, ethics committees, sensitivity, phrasing of sentences and words, recruitment of participants, location of interviews, type of interviews, emotionality management, medication error incidents’ management, researcher, or nurse?
Conclusion
By facing as many as possible methodological and ethical considerations and establishing solutions for them, the study’s validity, reliability, and rigor are enhanced, and the study is ethically robust. Finally, their understanding enables researchers to uncover nurses’ experiences and interpret the meanings they generate in depth.
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