Enabling collaboration and building trust among health science students attending an interprofessional educational project

Essential Elements of Preregistration Nursing Interprofessional Simulation Training

BACKGROUND

Internationally, interprofessional simulation (IPS) training increasingly is being included in nursing curricula. This systematic review examined the elements of IPS training that prepare nursing students for clinical practice.

METHOD

Five databases (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature [CINAHL], ProQuest, PubMed, Scopus, and Google Scholar) were searched for articles published from 2000 through 2020. Search terms included interprofessional, interdisciplinary, collaboration, collaborative care, teamwork, undergraduate nursing, and simulation. Thematic analysis of included studies was conducted using Braun and Clarke's (2006) six-phase approach.

RESULTS

Twenty-one studies were included. Five key themes emerged: (1) foster safe learning spaces, (2) realism matters, (3) effective debriefing is essential, (4) communication and teamwork increase patient safety, and (5) learning about scopes of practice and roles enables better care.

CONCLUSION

IPS training provides nursing students with learning opportunities that can fundamentally shape their capacity to work effectively in interprofessional and multi-disciplinary settings. [J Nurs Educ. 2023;62(1):28-35.].

Promoting academic resilience through peer support in a new pre-registration nursing programme

Nursing students can experience increased levels of stress while studying for their registration. It is acknowledged that higher education institutions should incorporate mechanisms to try to reduce these stress levels and build up resilience towards the difficult situations students may encounter during their studies. A bespoke method was created within a new part-time 4-year pre-registration nursing programme to support part-time junior (part 1) nursing students by implementing action learning sets within the programme. These sessions were delivered by part-time senior (part 3) nursing students who had already gone through similar experiences. Both the junior and senior students reported that they had gained benefits from this innovation, increasing their confidence and improving their ability to cope with some of the stressors of the programme. Building the resilience of nursing students within this pilot project was positively evaluated and could be developed further into other nursing programmes. This part-time programme was developed to retain nurses in Wales and was aimed at healthcare support workers with prior experience of providing the fundamentals of nursing care within local health boards.

Can nursing educators learn to trust the world's most trusted profession?

Nursing and nursing education face a paradox whereby the world's most trusted profession seems not to trust its own students and practitioners. Much of nursing education has adopted what has been memorably described as the 'cop shit' approach. This is the panoply of surveillance, anti-plagiarism and proctoring technologies that appear to be used more for policing and punishment of an inherently dishonest student body than to develop ethical and scholarly writing among future peers and colleagues. Nurses in practice may experience similar levels of distrust as they face growing micromanagement and control of both their appearance and nursing practice. We propose that these practices of distrust emerge, not from malice, but rather from the omnipresent neoliberalism and managerialism that engulf almost every aspect of health and university life. Neoliberalism's success has been to reformat academia and practice to the point where such ingrained mistrust has become merely a neutral recognition of 'the real world'. Dismantling nursing and education's 'cop shit' culture and replacing it with the trust and respect that the world's most trusted profession is accorded by wider society will not be easy, but it is vital for the future of nursing.

Establishing trust within interprofessional teams with a novel simulation activity in the pediatric clerkship

Interprofessional trust is essential for effective team-based care. Medical students are transient members of clinical teams during clerkship rotations and there may be limited focus on developing competency in interprofessional collaboration. Within a pediatric clerkship rotation, we developed a novel simulation activity involving an interprofessional conflict, aiming to foster trusting interprofessional relationships. Active participants included a nurse educator and a medical student participant, with additional students using a checklist to actively observe. The debrief focused on teaching points related to interprofessional competencies and conflict resolution. Students completed a written evaluation immediately following the simulation. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze Likert-type scale questions. Conventional content analysis was used to analyze open-ended responses. Two hundred and fourteen students participated in the simulation between June 2018-June 2019. Most students indicated that the simulation was effective (86%) and improved their confidence to constructively manage disagreements about patient care (88%). Students described anticipated changes in practice including developing their role on the interprofessional team as a medical student, developing a shared mental model, and establishing a shared goal. Our findings suggest that simulation-based learning may present an opportunity for developing interprofessional trust in academic health centers.