Session 9: New trends in health education

Introduction: Simulation may be used to teach theory, assessment, application and integration of knowledge and skills in surgical nursing and allows learners to function in an environment that is as close as possible to an actual clinical situation. Simulation is very useful for the evaluation method for surgical nursing care and also for enhancing and evaluating critical thinking, problem solving, and team leading for all levels of staff. Aim of this review is to highlight the effectiveness of simulation in surgical – perioperative nursing education and training. Systematic review was made in google scholar using “simulation AND nursing” as well as “simulation AND nursing education” key words for research articles on simulation using filters years of publication (last five) and the term was found only in title. 387 articles were the results from the first search and we included only research articles. Results: Importance and effectiveness of simulation in surgical-perioperative nursing education and training is highlighted in reviewed research articles pointing out that a simulated environment lets surgical nurses learn, train, grow, and even make mistakes without the possibility of patient harm. A simulation session can be video-recorded and played back later to show participants behaviors that they may have been unaware of during the simulation. Scenarios using the patient simulators can be played out with no harm to a patient and they also test communication and leadership skills while perioperative interns can step into the role of a perioperative nurse with its responsibilities and demands, in a risk-free environment with no danger of injuring actual patients. Conclusion: Surgical - perioperative care nursing requires a high level of attention to details, quick assessment skills, and critical thinking and simulation allows the opportunity to learn and practice in a controlled and safe environment. Simulation can be used to expose the learner to real conditions and treatments but also to infrequent ones that would otherwise be missed in usual clinical training environments.

Background Studies have shown that nursing students have challenges in translating and applying their theoretical knowledge in a clinical context. Virtual patients (VPs) have been proposed as an adequate learning and assessment activity to improve clinical reasoning. Although feedback and debriefing are essential aspects to foster learning in medical simulation, few studies have explored systematic and theory anchored ways of supporting feed forward and debriefing based on student activity collected in a systematic manner. Objective The aim of this study was to develop a systematic approach for collecting the nursing students’ clinical reasoning artifacts as they encounter virtual patients. Method The Outcome-Present-State-Test (OPT) model for clinical reasoning was used as the starting point since it is an internationally common model used by faculty to plan for and design learning activities in nursing education (Pesut DJ et al.). Two virtual patients were developed using the virtual patient nursing design model vpNDM (Georg C et al. 2014). Nighty-five participants from undergraduate nursing education encountered the VPs and the intervention was composed of the exploration of methods for tracking and collecting the participants’ clinical reasoning artifacts. Results An instrument to collect the students’ clinical reasoning was developed. Artifacts are collected during the whole virtual patient encounter. The aspects collected are related to clinical judgment, nursing action, outcome and present states, cue logic and the client in context. The empirical demonstrated that the instrument was able to collect and expose quantitative and qualitative aspects of the students’ clinical reasoning. Conclusions A method to systematically collect aspects of clinical reasoning during a virtual patient driven learning activity would allow purposeful feed forward and provide the necessary information for constructive debriefing sessions.