#Nurse education #apps help nurses find information fast and get back to caring for patients. via @MedStarWHC
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I think we’ll continue to see more nursing apps developed as the next generation goes into nursing. Health care likely will continue to grow and become more complex. Apps that can build on what we’ve done with askNED will play a key role in our nursing education going forward.
Clinical nursing simulations: Practice makes perfect
Nothing beats the value of real-world, practical experience for our nurses. However, today’s nursing students often get less practical experience than classroom instruction. We have found they appreciate extra nursing simulations in our RN Residency and other educational programs for nurses.
Our nurses practice patient assessment on high-tech digitized mannequins that have simulated heartbeats, blood pressure, breathing and vocal responses. One critical simulation that uses these mannequins is a mock Code Blue. A real Code Blue indicates a patient needs immediate, life-saving care, so we want to make sure our nurses practice their responses before that actually happens. In a mock Code Blue, we place a mannequin in a patient room. The nurse goes through the entire process just as they would if resuscitating a real patient. We conduct these simulations monthly in different patient areas of our hospital and in the classroom setting.
Simulations help nurses practice, but for training that’s even truer to life, we have to incorporate real people. We’re increasingly conducting more simulations with patient actors who come to the hospital and follow a script. The actors play patients with particular conditions or diseases, and the nurses work with the protocols they know to provide needed care.
After the simulation, the nurses get feedback from nurse educators and the patient actors. The educators talk to the nurses about what they learned and how they can improve. The actors discuss their experience as well, such as how engaged and attentive the nurses were. Nurses say they learn so much from this feedback, so we allow more time for feedback than we do for the actual patient interaction. It’s given our nurses helpful insight about their patient care.
Albert Einstein once noted that the value of an education “is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.” That’s even more true in the modern world. Healthcare providers today have to track more facts than any one person could remember on their own. Our nurses’ training ensures that they’ll have resources they are comfortable with and know where to find information they need when lives are on the line.
