Engaging Nurse Practitioner Students Through an Integrated Team-Based Simulation Experience

Purpose: Engaging graduate students in active learning experiences is essential to developing critical thinking and problem solving skills. Research shows that students who are actively engaged in simulated learning experiences demonstrated improved student, professional, and client outcomes. Simulated experiences developed by faculty, using problem based learning methodology, engaged interdisciplinary Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP) and Psych Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP) in a shared simulation experience to foster effective interprofessional patient care (Cowperthwait et al., 2015; Giddons et al, 2014).

Methods: Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) FNP, and Psych Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP) faculty jointly developed a standardized patient scenario for students in the final semester. Interdisciplinary faculty collaborated to develop a scenario that encompassed advanced practice care needs in each specialty (Cowperthwait, Saylor, & Schell, 2014). After completing the simulation, students met in small interprofessional groups, debriefed and discussed patient care strategies and challenges faced from their discipline perspective (Saylor, Vernoony, Selekman, & Cowperthwait, 2016). Students were also required to complete a case conceptualization and plan of care for the client. Faculty members directed and participated in this in depth debriefing session.

Results: Advanced practice graduate students reported various benefits of this engaging simulation to address complex patient needs and collaborate with interprofessional colleagues to better address the whole health of the client (Bell et al., 2014). Analysis of videos allowed faculty to recognize the need for additional program integrative care delivery and interprofessional collaboration. Simulated learning outcomes include improved problem solving, critical thinking, persistence, and adaptability. This advanced interdisciplinary simulation technique further developed students skills in critical thinking, communication, negotiation, collaboration, and interprofessional leadership.

Conclusion: Developing, implementing, and evaluating interdisciplinary simulation scenarios can pose challenges. Solutions to these challenges, such as developing realistic scenarios and case studies, faculty time, and control of standardized patient script delivery are important aspects of designing such experiences for students (Sittner et al., 2015). Benefits include students receiving feedback from peer evaluations, monitoring professional growth over the semesters, and learning to perform self-evaluation concomitantly with faculty evaluation. When utilizing traditional and advanced simulation techniques, students learn to effectively think, communicate, negotiate, collaborate, and lead in interprofessional roles.