Högskolan i Skövde

Motivation & Aim

Although school of nursing curricula often refer to caring as the central core in nursing practice, students often have a gap in understanding and knowing how to intertwine caring in all aspect of nursing practice. Thus, nursing curricula often tend to focus more on developing psychomotor skills and knowledge, referred to as doing, with less concentration on how one interacts with patients. Even though there has been extensive research on simulation in nursing education there are limited studies focusing on the intentional and visible incorporation of compassionate and competent caring behavior in simulations. Therefore, the aim was to describe undergraduate nursing students’ experiences of practicing caring behaviors with a standardized patient. 

Method

A sample of forty-eight fourth semester undergraduate nursing students enrolled in a five-week caring behavior course at a Swedish university, were at the first and last week individually video-recorded during two caring behavior simulations with a standardized patient. After observing each of their video-recordings, students completed individual written reflection on their own verbal and nonverbal caring behavior. The written reflections were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. 

Conclusion

Simulated encounters with standardized patients that visibly intertwine caring with nursing practice facilitates nursing students’ learning of compassionate and competent caring behaviors

The learning experience made the students aware of the impact of practicing caring in nursing practice, recognizing that being with is not the same as doing for the patient, and thus, how challenging it is to be mindfully present in patient encounters

Video-recorded caring behavior simulations provide a feasible educational learning didactic, facilitating students’ learning to apply caring behaviors