Enhancing assessment skills and assessing clinical judgment utilizing standardized patients during an Emergency/Disaster simulation

Truman, Jean M.

Monday, 18 November 2013

Jean M. Truman, DNP, RN, CMSRN, CNE
Nursing, University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, Bradford, PA

Learning Objective 1: The learner will be able to relate how to enhance the assessment skills of students by using standardized patients during an Emergency/Disaster simulation.

Learning Objective 2: The learner will be able to discuss opportunities for using simulation to assess clinical judgment related to accurately triaging patients during an Emergency/Disaster simulation.

Simulated learning experiences have become an established pedagogy for teaching clinical skills in undergraduate nursing programs. Students learn in a controlled environment which affords them the opportunity to safely experience a patient encounter while critically thinking and problem solving without fear of harm to the patient. As nurse educators strive to assess the clinical competence of their students, simulated learning experiences also afford both formative and summative evaluations of students.

A simulated learning experience was developed for final-semester associate degree nursing students utilizing standardized patients to represent disaster victims arriving at the emergency room. The students were required to accurately assess the patients and utilize the principles of mass casualty triage to correctly classify the patients as Emergent, Urgent, Nonurgent, or Expectant.

Students’ clinical judgment was assessed during the interactions with the standardized patient. The outcomes of this simulated learning experience reveal that nursing students were able to perform accurate assessments and classify the patients according to the principles of mass casualty triage. The simulated learning experience is flexible enough to adapt to meet cultural and generational needs of the program curricula. The use of the standardized patients allows portability of the simulated learning experience to meet the needs of programs internationally.

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