Experiencing a critical event in the clinical environment is a confusing and an emotional experience for both the novice nursing student as well as a more experienced student. In Clinical, students can experience deteriorating patients, codes, patient deaths, patient falls, and other critical incidents.
While the faculty’s simulation lab provides valuable experience for the students on managing a critical event in term five, students are often very emotional about an experience if it occurs in clinical, voicing concerns frequently that they feel that the event is their fault, or that they are having trouble understanding what occurred. Students risk carrying these thoughts and emotions into the rest of their week and clinical practice in the future.
Nursing clinical instructors will have to provide a debrief to students in clinical in order to facilitate the student’s ability to cope and flourish in the clinical environment. The faculty provides new instructors an opportunity to practice student debrief in a safe simulation environment, however both newer and experienced instructors would benefit from a tool to prompt debrief while in clinical.
The designed flashcard system is accessible by instructors conducting clinical training at remote sites and for local instructors while they are in the hospital environment with students. Using the Dreifurst (2015) Debriefing for Meaningful Learning model which was further refined in Scott and Catledge, (2017), cards provide prompts on how to guide a student through a critical debrief. White, et al., (2021) further suggested that instructor body cues and the environment would affect the debrief for the student. Therefore, this tool also includes prompts on ensuring a safe environment for the student to debrief. The flashcards were designed using H5P interactive technology (H5P Group, 2017) to make the tool a better learning experience both for the instructor and the student.
To facilitate calming or meditative coping for the student, an optional calming sound is embedded in one of the later slides. Additionally, the email for the faculty’s mental health nurse practitioner is included, making the tool a well rounded resource for debriefing your student in clinical on a moment’s notice.
This video explains how to use the flashcard tool.
Below is the tool designed to debrief your students in clinical. This tool is envisioned to be accessible through the MS Teams or other local faculty resource housing environment, however, for now, is remotely accessible and playable through this web page.
References
Dreifuerst. (2015). Getting Started with Debriefing for Meaningful Learning. Clinical Simulation in Nursing, 11(5), 268–275. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecns.2015.01.005.
H5P Group. (2017). Flashcards. Retrieved October 23, 2022 from https://h5p.org/flashcards.
Scott, A., and Catledge, C., (2017) Debriefing for Meaningful Learning (DML): Connecting the Dots. Presentation to 28th International Nursing Research Conference, Dublin, Ireland. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10755/621475.
White, H., Hayes, C., Axisa, C., & Power, T. (2021). On the Other Side of Simulation: Evaluating Faculty Debriefing Styles. Clinical Simulation in Nursing, 61, 96-106.