Nigerian Nursing Students’ Readiness to Use Electronic Health Records in Clinical Practice

Abstract

Most hospitals in Nigeria still rely on paper-based medical records. This aspect  has created a lot of challenges to the documentation in the health care system in the country. The purpose of this descriptive cross-sectional  study conducted in 2019 was to assess Nursing Students’ readiness to use electronic health records in clinical practice. A systematic sampling technique was used to recruit a total of 189 nursing students from two schools of nursing in Ibadan, Oyo State Metropolis in Nigeria; 63 from each year of  the three year program. Data collection involved a self-constructed questionnaire comprised of four sections. Data analysis, which involved SPSS, version 21.0, included frequency counts and percentages. The findings of the study included the following:  less than half of the respondents (49%), mostly female (78%) were within the age range 16-20;  a significant number of respondents (86.2%) were ready to utilize electronic health records in clinical practice; the  perceived barriers to electronic health records use were computer illiteracy, lack of training, unstable power supply, and cost of maintenance and implementation (64.0%; 56.6%; 64.0% 56.1%) respectively. In conclusion, the study highlighted nursing students' readiness to use electronic health records and  the substantial impediments to doing so. Therefore, it is recommended that all relevant stakeholders must work together to reduce the obstacles that could prevent the deployment of electronic health records in clinical nursing practice.