Simulation: An effective pedagogical approach for nursing?

Simulation features strongly within the undergraduate nursing curriculum for many Universities. It provides avariety of opportunities for students as they develop their clinical nursing skills. The nursing literaturehighlights the potential of this approach and the positive opportunities afforded to students in terms ofdeveloping competence and confidence. However, much of this literature focuses upon the more operationalconcerns of simulation. This paper reflects upon the evolution of simulation in nurse education. It considersthe theoretical positioning and understanding of simulation as a teaching and learning approach forundergraduate nursing skills development. The work of Vygotsky (1978) and Lave and Wenger (1991) arehighlighted in order to begin to explore the theoretical basis of simulation as an effective pedagogicalapproach for nurse education today, enabling students to learn to be nurse

Learning nursing through simulation: Towards an expansive model of learning

This thesis explores the impact of simulation upon learning for undergraduate nursing students. A brief history of the evolution of pre-registration nurse education and the development of simulation for nursing provide background and context to the study.The conceptual frameworks used for this study draw upon the work of Benner and Sutphen (2007) and Engeström (1994). Benner and Sutphen’s work highlights the complex nature of situated knowledge in practice disciplines such as nursing. They suggest that knowledge must be constantly integrated within the curriculum through pedagogies of interpretation, formation, contextualisation and performance. These pedagogies present a framework, which enhances the understanding of the impact of simulation upon student learning. Engeström’s work on activity theory, recognises the links between learning and the environment of work and highlights the possibilities for learning to inspire change, innovation and the creation of new ideas. His notion of expansive learning offers nurse education a way of reconceptualising the learning that occurs during simulation. Together these frameworks present an opportunity for nurse education to articulate and theorise the learning inherent in simulation activities.Conducted as a small-scale narrative case study, this study tells the unique stories of a small number of undergraduate nursing students, nurse mentors and nurse educators and explores their experiences of learning through simulation. The nurse educators viewed simulation as a means of helping students to learn to be nurses, whilst, the nurse mentors suggested that simulation helped them to determine nursing potential. The students’ narratives revealed that they approached simulation learning in different ways resulting in a range of outcomes: those who were successfully becoming nurses, those who were struggling or working hard to become nurses and those who were not becoming nurses.A theoretical analysis of learning through simulation offers a means of conceptualizing and establishing different perspectives for understanding the learning described by the participants and offers new possibilities towards an expansive approach to learning nursing. The study concludes by examining what this interpretation of learning might mean for nurse education, nursing research and nursing practice

Overture POI data for the United Kingdom: a comprehensive, queryable open data product

Point of Interest data that is comprehensive, globally-available and open-access, is sparse, despite being important inputs for research in a number of application areas. New data from the Overture Maps Foundation offers significant potential in this arena, but accessing the data relies on computational resources beyond the skillset and capacity of the average researcher. In this article, we provide a processed version of the Overture places (POI) dataset for the UK, in a fully-queryable format, and provide accompanying code through which to explore the data, and generate other national subsets. In the article, we describe the construction and characteristics of the dataset, before considering how reliable it is (locational accuracy, attribute comprehensiveness), through direct comparison with Geolytix supermarket data. This dataset can support new and important research projects in a variety of different thematic areas, and foster a network of researchers to further evaluate its advantages and limitations.Comment: Main document: 6 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables. Supplementary: 2 pages, 2 figures, 1 tabl

Learning nursing through simulation: Towards an expansive model of learning

My study explores the impact of simulation upon learning for undergraduate nursing students. Conducted as a small-scale narrative case study, this study tells the unique stories of a small number of undergraduate nursing students, nurse mentors and nurse educators and explores their experiences of learning through simulation. Data analysis through progressive focusing (Parlett and Hamilton, 1972) revealed that the nurse educators viewed simulation as a means of helping students to learn to be nurses, whilst, the nurse mentors suggested that simulation helped them to determine nursing potential. The students’ narratives showed that they approached simulation learning in different ways resulting in a range of outcomes: those who were successfully becoming nurses, those who were struggling or working hard to become nurses and those who were not becoming nurses. The conceptual frameworks used for this study draw upon the work of Benner and Sutphen (2007) and Engeström (1994). Benner and Sutphen’s work highlights the complex nature of situated knowledge in practice disciplines such as nursing. They suggest that knowledge must be constantly integrated within the curriculum through pedagogies of interpretation, formation, contextualisation and performance. Engeström’s work on activity theory and expansive learning recognises the links between learning and the environment of work and highlights the possibilities for learning to inspire change, innovation and the creation of new ideas. Together these frameworks present an opportunity for nurse education to articulate and theorise the learning inherent in simulation activities. A theoretical analysis of learning through simulation offers a means of conceptualizing and establishing different perspectives for understanding the learning described by the participants and offers new possibilities towards an expansive approach to learning nursing. The study examines what this interpretation of learning might mean for nurse education, nursing research and nursing practice

Using simulation pedagogy in nursing to enhance learning through assessment

Engagement with professional practice learning introduced through simulation, which includes peer and formative assessment and builds towards summative assessment in clinical practice, is central to the undergraduate nursing curriculum at UWE and at many higher education institutions across the world. This approach enriches the student experience and, as health care and the patient population continue to change and evolve, enables students to develop an adaptive and critical understanding of nursing (Berragan, 2014). These features are not just additional ways of learning nursing and developing fundamental nursing skills; they are ways of knowing nursing (Berragan, 1998). There is real potential for assessment through simulation to help students to understand the key features of nursing and learn to deliver skilled, integrated and compassionate care to their patients. This presentation focuses upon the opportunities provided through simulation to enhance learning through assessment. Simulation supports opportunities for authentic assessment of the fundamental skills of nursing (Wiggins, 1989; Walters, 2014). The notion that assessment tasks should acknowledge and engage with the ways in which knowledge and skills are used in authentic settings is important (Boud, 2007). Assessment has a major influence upon learning, directing attention to areas of significance, acting as an incentive for learning and having a powerful effect upon students’ approaches to their learning (Boud and Falchikov, 2007). Assessment also guides students, emphasizing what they can and cannot succeed in doing (Boud, 2007). It is this aspect of simulation that we wish to highlight. Our current research explores undergraduate nursing students’ simulation experiences, and their descriptions of simulation during feedback, debriefing and formative assessment. It also highlights the benefits of peer assessment within the simulation learning environment as nursing students work together to demonstrate, describe and reflect upon their learning

Developments in simulation and learning for patient safety. Churchill Fellowship Report

Executive Summary I travelled to Australia where I spent 4 weeks exploring educational initiatives to support undergraduate healthcare students to learn to deliver safe and effective care to their patients. In particular I was interested in inter-professional education and simulation as pedagogical approaches to highlight the importance of patient safety, quality improvement and preparing students for the real world of healthcare practice. The objectives of my project were to: •Explore how patient safety issues can be transformed into learning opportunities through the use of innovative simulation approaches. •Share and identify practical simulation methodologies to address different aspects of clinical practice and patient safety. •Work with colleagues at Bristol and Bath universities to design, deliver, debrief and evaluate interdisciplinary simulation scenarios to address patient safety. •Work towards embedding interdisciplinary simulations for patient safety within nursing, pharmacy and medical curricula. The project was and will continue to be carried out in a number of phases: 1. Development and pilot of inter-professional ward simulations for final year medical, pharmacy and nursing students. This was in progress prior to my Fellowship application. 2. Dissemination of results of the pilot studies to encourage debate, critical analysis, evaluation and awareness of this work. The project has been presented and published at a number of healthcare, medical and nursing conferences and in International Nursing Journals. 3. To meet Professor Levett-Jones and colleagues from the University of Newcastle, New South Wales (NSW), Professor Kelly at Curtin University in Perth, and international colleagues attending the NETNEP 2016 conference in Australia to explore, experience, work with and discuss their work and views on simulation and patient safety. 4. Develop collaborative working opportunities with colleagues in Australia to share good practice and further disseminate this work to colleagues locally, nationally and internationally. 5. To use this exceptional opportunity and learning experience to share with colleagues at UWE, Bristol University and the University of Bath. Learning from my visits across Australia, I hope to develop and embed brief and intense simulation-based scenarios which will increase perceived confidence in communicating and working in impromptu teams for pre-qualifying students from multiple health science disciplines. My findings highlighted that in order to develop and embed authentic and realistic simulation experiences for learning, there needs to be not only enthusiasm to drive development but also the support, knowledge and infrastructure to underpin and sustain development. During conversations with colleagues in Australia a number of themes emerged as essential to simulation learning for healthcare practitioners. These themes reflect both the educational experience and the focus of safety and quality improvement: quality indicators for simulation, clinical reasoning, inter-professional education for teamwork and communication skills, cultural empathy and professional identity. My recommendations have evolved from analysis of the information that was shared with me and the need to ensure that any learning experience must be sustainable and sufficiently flexible for the needs of the healthcare workforce and for the benefit of patients and service users. These recommendations are: • To develop and embed National and local simulation principles and quality indicators for simulation-based education (SBE). • To provide support, identify frameworks and adopt pedagogical approaches for the development of clinical reasoning skills. • To ensure IPE focuses upon communication and teamwork skills • To develop and foster cultural empathy for compassionate healthcare • To understand and support the development of professional identity

Mapping Great Britain's semantic footprints through a large language model analysis of Reddit comments

Observed regional variation in geotagged social media text is often attributed to dialects, where features in language are assumed to exhibit region-specific properties. While dialects are seen as a key component in defining the identity of regions, there are a multitude of other geographic properties that may be captured within natural language text. In our work, we consider locational mentions that are directly embedded within comments on the social media website Reddit, providing a range of associated semantic information, and enabling deeper representations between locations to be captured. Using a large corpus of geoparsed Reddit comments from UK-related local discussion subreddits, we first extract embedded semantic information using a large language model, aggregated into local authority districts, representing the semantic footprint of these regions. These footprints broadly exhibit spatial autocorrelation, with clusters that conform with the national borders of Wales and Scotland. London, Wales, and Scotland also demonstrate notably different semantic footprints compared with the rest of Great Britain

Conceptualising learning through simulation: An expansive approach forprofessional and personal learning

This paper explores different ways of conceptualising the learning that occurs as student nurses engage in simulation experiences. The conceptual frameworks discussed in this paper draw upon the work of Benner and Sutphen (2007) and Engeström (1994). Benner and Sutphen's work highlights the complex nature of situated knowledge in practice disciplines such as nursing. They suggest that knowledge must be constantly integrated within the curriculum through pedagogies of interpretation, formation, contextualisation and performance. These pedagogies present a framework, which may enhance our understanding of the impact of simulation upon student learning. Engeström's work on activity theory, recognises the links between learning and the environment of work and highlights the possibilities for learning to inspire change, innovation and the creation of new ideas. His notion of expansive learning offers nurse education a means of reconceptualising the learning that occurs during simulation. Together these frameworks present an opportunity for nurse education to articulate and theorise the learning inherent in simulation activities. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd