Caring Values and the Simulation Environment: Select Baccalaureate Nursing Students’ Experiences

The art and science of nursing with its intricate caring practices have foundational aspects of knowledge, skills, and behaviors. These are launched and integrated in undergraduate nursing programs. This education is paramount and one of the building blocks for the profession of nursing to ensure expert care of patients, families, and communities. The simulation environment is one strategy that is combined in nursing education programs to support the nursing students’ development and it is during this educational strategy that caring values are incorporated into the core values of professional nurses. This research, utilizing interpretive description methodology, explored and expanded knowledge related to select baccalaureate nursing students’ caring values and abilities in the simulation environment. In this study, a focus group followed by six interviews with nursing students from a Canadian prairie province provided the rich subjective perceptions of caring. The unity of these select nursing students’ voices provided the context to interpret their thoughts, perceptions, and experiences to cultivate an interpretive explanation that is applicable to nurses. This research study explored the perceptions of nursing students specifically related to the advancement of caring values and abilities in the simulation environment, to provide an enlightened understanding of the complex variables in learning caring values with the development of knowing, doing, and being which did occur with these select nursing students. The researcher’s reflective journal contributed as an additional source of data that supported the interpretation of the descriptions whilst combining foundational concepts such as nursing’s metaparadigms, transformational learning, and caring. Additional concepts explored to expand the comprehension of caring within the pedagogy of learning in the simulation environment were the co-creation of knowledge, the transitions nursing students experience, engagement and disengagement, nursing time, and nursing moments of caring. By identifying these connections, there is an opportunity to further the art and science of nursing, impact nursing education, increase the capacity of the simulation environment for the affective way of knowing, and deepen the understanding of caring practices