Journal of Research in Nursing

Patient safety is key for healthcare across the world and education is critical in improving practice. We drew on existing links to develop the Shared LearnIng from Practice to improve Patient Safety (SLIPPS) group. The group incorporates expertise in education, research, healthcare, healthcare organisation and computing from Norway, Spain, Italy, the UK and Finland. In 2016 we received co-funding from the Erasmus + programme of the European Union for a 3-year project.

SLIPPS aims to develop a tool to gather learning events related to patient safety from students in each country, and to use these both for further research to understand practice, and to develop educational activities (virtual seminars, simulation scenarios and a game premise).

The SLIPPS project is well underway. It is underpinned by three main theoretical bodies of work: the notion of diverse knowledge contexts existing in academia, practice and at an organisational level; the theory of reflective practice; and experiential learning theory. The project is based on recognition of the unique position of students as they navigate between contexts, experience and reflect on important learning events related to patient safety. To date, we have undertaken the development of the SLIPPS Learning Event Recording Tool (SLERT) and have begun to gather event descriptions and reflections.

Key to the ongoing success of SLIPPS are relationships and reciprocal openness to view things from diverse perspectives and cultures.

Research has identified that virtual simulations may be effective in developing non-technical skills including communication, teamwork and decision making. However, little is known about how participants perceive learning non-technical skills via engagement in virtual simulation.

The aim of this research was to investigate participant perceptions and the learning experiences when engaging in virtual simulations focused on developing non-technical skills.

A descriptive exploratory approach was used. An online voluntary survey collected qualitative extended responses from participants after each virtual simulation. Ethics approval was obtained for the research and guidelines adhered to throughout the study.

A total of 675 responses were obtained. Participants perceive that engaging with the virtual simulation made them aware of non-technical skills including communication, teamwork, decision making, critical thinking and problem solving, and, to a lesser extent, situational awareness. Additional categories of learning, clinical practice and limitations were identified.

Engaging in virtual simulation can develop awareness of non-technical skills, as well as confidence and vigilance in practice and mindfulness of a person-centred approach to healthcare. Engaging in virtual simulation may support change in the professional performance of the participants through role modelling and learning through error.

Service user involvement in educating healthcare professionals in higher education can help student nurses develop a compassionate approach to care practice. This article explains one university’s initiative, the Patient as Coach Team (PaCT), and presents evaluation results from phase 1. The PaCT strategy involved a service user-led session with student nurses, in small groups, sharing experiences of care from a service user perspective.

Our aim was to evaluate nursing students’ views of the PaCT session, involving service users in their teaching and learning.

Survey.

Structured questionnaires with a free-text box were completed by student nurses (n = 321). Structured question responses were analysed manually and free-text data thematically. Data collection took place from June 2016 to June 2017.

There were very positive responses to the survey questions, with students perceiving a positive impact on their learning. Five themes emerged from the students’ free-text responses: ‘Usefulness of the session’, ‘Seeing patients’ perspectives’, ‘Inspiring and motivating session’, ‘Good discussions with patient coach’ and ‘Overall views about the PaCT session’.

The PaCT session provides a valid learning strategy, utilising coaching as a technique to enable student nurses to learn from service users’ experiences and perspectives of care. In addition, it contributes to students’ reflective practice about their individual professional practice in care settings.

The context of the research was in a setting where undergraduate nursing students spend 50% of their programme in clinical practice and 50% in a higher education institute. Research participants were undertaking the adult branch of nursing education.

• To explore emotional debriefing in relation to nursing practice.

• To highlight the emotional concerns of the research participants regarding clinical placement.

• To gain an insight into the use of art/creativity in emotional debriefing.

Narrative inquiry was used to gain an insight into, and a deeper understanding of, how undergraduate nurses feel about their clinical placement experiences. The research was carried out in three stages: the art intervention, a diary account of the art intervention, and a follow-up face-to-face discussion between each participant and the researcher.

The findings suggest the intervention helped the participants to articulate and process their emotions. All participants acknowledged the importance of the three-step approach, with follow-up to the art intervention.

This research project has highlighted the potential value of a creative approach to emotional debriefing. A wider inclusion of the arts could be explored. Facilitation of emotional debriefing may help build resilience in undergraduate nurses. There is growing recognition for the need to foster resilience in undergraduate nursing student programmes.

Debates relevant to both undergraduate and postgraduate nurse education regarding the conceptualisation and disciplinary ownership of dementia, including its framing as a neuro-psychiatric condition, a terminal illness or a consequence of ageing, are important in supporting an understanding of the lived experience of dementia for individuals and their family carers and how, as a condition, it has come to be problematised in Western society. The work of Michel Foucault is useful in setting this debate within a critical historical context.

Using Foucault's ‘history of problematizations’ we present such debates around dementia's conceptualisation in Western society and consider how a Foucauldian critical historical project influences nursing education by re-examining the problematisation of dementia within society, what it is to be a person with dementia, and how alternative conceptualisations shape how we see the condition – as well as how we provide learning opportunities for dementia-care professionals.

Six differing ways of conceptualising or problematising dementia were found (as a natural consequence of ageing, a mental disorder, a bio-medical disease, a neuro-cognitive disorder, a disability and a terminal illness), each offering alternative ways we might present it in an educational context.

We argue for both undergraduate and postgraduate student nurses to engage in learning that locates what it is to be a person with dementia within particular conceptual frameworks that would allow understanding of how these ideas or constructs are reliant on historically contingent assumptions. Here, taken-for-granted assumptions are unsettled, and a more critically reflective position is adopted. This will have an impact on the type of nurse to emerge from educational institutions, thus also affecting service delivery and the dementia care provided, as well as the knock-on effects for dementia education in other medical, health and social care courses and for institutions whose role it is to approve professional practice curricula content.

Providing effective methods of raising career awareness for nursing students could affect their career self-efficacy and enable them to overcome the potential career barriers.

The aim of this study was two-fold: (a) to investigate the effect of career-awareness sessions on perceived career and talent development self-efficacy and career barriers among nursing students; and (b) to determine the relationship between career and talent development self-efficacy and career barriers.

A quasi-experimental research study with one-group, pre-test post-test design was conducted using a convenience sample of nursing students (N = 245) who enrolled in the second year at the Technical Nursing Institute, Alexandria University, Egypt. Career Awareness Sessions (CASs) were introduced to nursing students as the study intervention. The Career and Talent Development Self-Efficacy Scale and the Career Barriers Inventory were used to measure study variables for pre- and post-awareness sessions.

CASs had a significant effect on study variables, where the career and talent development self-efficacy score of nursing students significantly increased after sessions. Also, the career barriers score significantly decreased after sessions (p < 0.001). A significant negative correlation between perceived career and talent development self-efficacy and career barriers was found (p < 0.001).

Nursing curricula should prepare nursing students by offering continuous educational opportunities to assist them in enhancing their talent development self-efficacy needed for their professional roles and to overcome their potential career barriers.

Globally, government and higher education institutions are expected to increase international student numbers. Programme development, marketing international collaboration and management has been the focus of strategy roll out.

This study aimed to explore international student experiences while undertaking Master of Science postgraduate education far from home.

A qualitative descriptive design was used. Following ethical approval, 11 students studying on a Master of Science Nursing postgraduate programme in one health education institute in Ireland volunteered to participate. Students were of Asian origin and mixed gender and the average age was 27. Data were collected using face-to-face semi-structured interviews and data analysis followed Burnard’s thematic framework.

The data provide evidence of the complexities and challenges experienced when studying on a Master of Science postgraduate nursing programme. Students described a process of juggling to survive and succeed. Three overarching categories emerged: differing realities, working through, and learning new ways.

This study adds to international debate regarding structures and processes supporting international nurse education. In meeting ethnic and culturally-diverse student learning needs, consideration of learning and teaching approaches is warranted. For globalisation in nurse education to prosper, investment needs to move from focusing on recruitment towards structures and processes to nurture intercultural learning.