Abstract:
Background to the study: The Critical Care nursing programme at the Faculty of
Health Sciences (Stellenbosch University) is a one-year programme. The practical
component consists of practical procedures and case presentations. Students have
limited time available in the clinical areas to reach competency in the practical skills.
Students tend to use the majority of the clinical teaching time available to reach
competency in these practical procedures, rather than discussing the patient and
learning the skills to integrate and understand the patient’s condition and treatment,
which they can acquire by doing case presentations. The end result of this misuse of
clinical contact time is that some of the students, by the end of their programme, still
have difficulty to integrate a patient’s diagnosis and treatment regime, although they
have managed to complete the expected practical procedures.
Summary of the work: A case study design was used. I wanted to investigate whether
one could make use of simulation and the Clinical Skills Centre (CSC) to complete the
majority of the practical procedures so that more time would be available in the clinical
areas for the students to do case presentations. The study focuses on describing how
the tutors and students involved experienced the use of simulation, as well as how it
impacted on the available teaching time in the clinical areas.
Conclusions and recommendations: Some of the most important issues that were
highlighted in the study and needs to be mentioned are the following:
· The students highly valued supervision by a Critical Care tutor when practising their
skills in the CSC.
· Students indicated that they valued the opportunity to practise some of the more
risky procedures in simulation, because it presents no risk to patients.
· Case presentations seem important to be added to the CSC’s practical sessions in
order to attempt making the practical simulated scenarios even more realistic.
· The teaching at the bedside in the clinical areas used to be done somewhat ad hoc.
With the teaching in the CSC now being much more structured, this necessitates the
teaching at the bedside to be revisited and to be structured to a certain extent.
Summary of the results: The information obtained from the Critical Care tutors and the
students indicated that these two groups were largely in agreement that simulation
seems to be valuable and can effectively be used in a Critical Care nursing programme.
