Addressing Limited Clinical Experiences for Nursing Students

This descriptive case study addressed the problem that nursing students at a small community college lacked clinical experiences that promoted identification of their strengths and weaknesses in knowledge and skills expected of nurses. The interest in this individual case and purpose of this study was to understand the clinical learning activities nursing students at this site believed were effective strategies for evaluating their strengths and assessing areas needing improvement in their nursing practice. The theoretical foundation of adult learning formed the basis of this descriptive case study using a survey design to assess the students\u27 perceptions of clinical learning activities that were effective for evaluating their strengths and weaknesses in their nursing practice. Descriptive statistics including frequencies and percentages of responses to a survey were used to summarize data related to the students\u27 preferences for learning based on clinical activities. Key findings indicated that a large percentage of nursing students at the site strongly agreed that high-fidelity simulation was an effective strategy for evaluating strengths and assessing areas needing improvement in their nursing practice. Based on the findings, a curriculum plan with tools to prepare nursing educators to facilitate debriefing to enhance clinical learning activities was developed for the local school of nursing. The results of this study can be used by nursing educators as they integrate active learning and assessment activities, particularly high-fidelity simulation, into nursing education at this site. The findings could contribute to positive social change when nursing educators at the site are empowered to implement and assess components of the curriculum plan to positively impact nursing students\u27 ability to reflect and evaluate their nursing practice resulting in improving their learning and nursing care

Using National Measures of Patients' Perceptions of Health Care to Design and Debrief Clinical Simulations

This article describes an innovative approach to using national measures of patients' perspectives of quality health care. Nurses from a regional simulation consortium designed and executed a simulation using the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey to prepare nurses to improve care and, in turn, enhance patients' perceptions of care. The consortium is currently revising the reporting mechanism to collect data about specific learning objectives based on national quality indicator benchmarks, specifically HCAHPS. This revision reflects the changing needs of health care to include quality metrics in simulation

Creating a Professional Development Plan for a Simulation Consortium

As the United States struggles with health care reform and a nursing education system that inadequately prepares students for practice, dramatic advances in educational technology signal opportunities for both academic and practicing nurses to affect our profession as never before. Simulation technologies provide large and small institutions with the means to educate health care students and novice professionals effectively and efficiently through hands-on experience, but the costs of such a venture can be prohibitive. A simulation consortium offers a venue for different health care and educational institutions with shared goals to pool knowledge, monies, and labor toward health care education throughout a geographic area. This article details one Midwestern U.S. region's work in creating a professional development plan for a new simulation consortium

Rescaling multipartite entanglement measures for mixed states

A relevant problem regarding entanglement measures is the following: Given an arbitrary mixed state, how does a measure for multipartite entanglement change if general local operations are applied to the state? This question is nontrivial as the normalization of the states has to be taken into account. Here we answer it for pure-state entanglement measures which are invariant under determinant 1 local operations and homogeneous in the state coefficients, and their convex-roof extension which quantifies mixed-state entanglement. Our analysis allows to enlarge the set of mixed states for which these important measures can be calculated exactly. In particular, our results hint at a distinguished role of entanglement measures which have homogeneous degree 2 in the state coefficients.Comment: Published version plus one important reference (Ref. [39]

Addressing Limited Clinical Experiences for Nursing Students

This descriptive case study addressed the problem that nursing students at a small community college lacked clinical experiences that promoted identification of their strengths and weaknesses in knowledge and skills expected of nurses. The interest in this individual case and purpose of this study was to understand the clinical learning activities nursing students at this site believed were effective strategies for evaluating their strengths and assessing areas needing improvement in their nursing practice. The theoretical foundation of adult learning formed the basis of this descriptive case study using a survey design to assess the students' perceptions of clinical learning activities that were effective for evaluating their strengths and weaknesses in their nursing practice. Descriptive statistics including frequencies and percentages of responses to a survey were used to summarize data related to the students' preferences for learning based on clinical activities. Key findings indicated that a large percentage of nursing students at the site strongly agreed that high-fidelity simulation was an effective strategy for evaluating strengths and assessing areas needing improvement in their nursing practice. Based on the findings, a curriculum plan with tools to prepare nursing educators to facilitate debriefing to enhance clinical learning activities was developed for the local school of nursing. The results of this study can be used by nursing educators as they integrate active learning and assessment activities, particularly high-fidelity simulation, into nursing education at this site. The findings could contribute to positive social change when nursing educators at the site are empowered to implement and assess components of the curriculum plan to positively impact nursing students' ability to reflect and evaluate their nursing practice resulting in improving their learning and nursing care