Paper
Sunday, November 4, 2007
105
Transdisciplinary Collaboration: Accelerated Nursing Students Rehearse New Skills
Pamela R. Cangelosi, PhD, RN, College of Health and Human Services, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA
| Learning Objective #1: identify two advantages and two disadvantages of academic transdisciplinary collaboration in nursing education.
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| Learning Objective #2: differentiate between the purposes of using Sim-Man, simulated patients, and standardized patients for teaching accelerated nursing students.
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Across the globe, accelerated baccalaureate nursing programs have proliferated in an effort to quickly increase the pool of qualified nurses. Since accelerated nursing students move so rapidly through their educational program, learning experiences that connect their learning to practice are essential. As the nursing shortage continues and as accelerated programs increase in popularity, it is imperative that strategies be implemented to maximize learning opportunities, even with limited clinical sites for students. One such strategy is the use of dramatic enactments of illness narratives in the campus skills lab. After receiving approval from the researcher’s University Human Subjects Review Board, and through a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, a purposive sample of 22 accelerated nursing students were interviewed regarding their participation in a simulated patient experience the previous semester. In this experience, theater students were trained to enact illness narratives as simulated patients. The nursing students were asked in the interviews to relate an incident in the simulated lab experience that was important in assisting them in skill performance in the clinical setting. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed within an interpretive phenomenological framework. The theme, “Decreasing Performance Anxiety” emerged from the data. Participants related increased confidence in the clinical setting if they had performed nursing skills with the simulated patient within the safety of the scenario enacted in the campus lab. Data suggested that students were able to better integrate classroom learning with clinical experiences and function more effectively in the clinical setting after their involvement in the illness narratives of simulated patients in the campus lab. Further research is needed to investigate teaching strategies that facilitate integration of the vast quantities of knowledge nursing students must assimilate in order to assume new roles as competent clinicians.