Nursing students spend a lot of time completing clinical rotations in various healthcare organizations throughout Central Minnesota.
With clinical sites closing down due to COVID-19, the Department of Nursing Science is finding new ways to prepare students for working with patients.
In a typical semester, the program’s more than 200 nursing students can be found at St. Cloud Hospital twice each week, working with patients in a clinical setting. They also complete clinical experiences in long-term care facilities, community-based programs and public health agencies.
With the restrictions due to COVID-19 keeping them from hands-on clinical experiences, the Department of Nursing is getting creative. Thanks to a recent donation to the nursing department from Jim ’73 and Ann Marie Maciej, the department was able to purchase i-Human, a Kaplan software program that simulates patient-care clinicals through a virtual clinical simulation experience.
“The primary function of i-Human is to replicate, through a virtual clinical simulation experience, what students may see in a real patient care environment,” said Jane Bagley, nursing department chair.
I-Human includes 29 cases that challenge students in experiences with obstetric, pediatric, adult and older adult patient simulations.
“The virtual clinical simulation mirrors the actual clinical healthcare environment as close to real as possible,” Bagley said.
Through i-Human, students prep their assigned patient which consists of learning why the patient has been admitted, the patient’s past medical history, relevant lab and vital sign values, current medications, and nursing assessments. Students must provide a comprehensive review of each prescribed medication in order to promote safe and effective care.
The virtual clinical simulation allows students to measure a patient’s vital signs and make appropriate clinical judgments based on the obtained values. This is important in order to determine which assessments require follow-up interventions.
Kaplan’s i-Human has the ability for students to hear and assess the patient’s heart, lung and bowel sounds through recorded sounds, helping to facilitate an experience as real as it can be through virtual reality.
By the time nursing students graduate from St. Cloud State University, they complete 1,080 hours of clinical in various health care settings. While seniors graduating this spring have already completed the minimum clinical hours required to take the national licensing exam (NCLEX-RN), being out of direct, hands-on healthcare clinicals is challenging because this is where students learn how to touch and interact with their assigned patients, Bagley said.
While i-Human doesn’t replace that experience, it is offering students a new kind of clinical opportunity, she said.
It is engaging their critical thinking skills in a different way because they need to take all the important assessment information from the virtual cases and evaluate the whole picture to determine which patient needs are most urgent. The simulation requires that students think about how to communicate with their patient, thereby promoting therapeutic communication and building overall communication skills, Bagley said.
Once they finish with the prep and assessment components, they need to decide upon skilled nursing interventions. A faculty expert built into the Kaplan i-Human system evaluates their session and explains what they did right and what they got wrong. It provides recommendations about what the student should do differently to improve their overall clinical judgment in the future.
“It builds students’ ability to communicate not only with the patient but also with the health care team,” she said.
Students have been responding positively to the change. They are resilient, she added.
“We are trying to provide additional resources and mentoring through this period of uncertainty due to COVID-19,” Bagley said. “We don’t want to rely on a virtual product, but at least we have a viable supplement in this time way from clinical.”
Part of that planning is preparing to recognize and honor the graduating students this spring and bring them back for their Pinning Ceremony in August.
“We want to support them at this time,” Bagley said. “They are probably feeling a sense of loss because they are missing out on celebrations of graduation, but they’ve been understanding and absolute professionals.”
