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U N I V E R S I T Y O F P I T T S B U R G H |
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Volume XI, Number 1 |
September
2005 |
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U N I V E R S I T Y O F P I T T S B U R G H |
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Volume XI, Number 1 |
September
2005 |
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Communication Skills for Nursing Students
Margaret Rosenzweig, Nursing, recognized that in clinical settings her oncology nurse practitioner students sometimes had difficulty communicating with their patients. Although students were proficient at providing information, they were not good at listening and picking up cues that patients were having difficulty understanding and reacting to that information or broaching difficult or sensitive issues with their cancer care providers. With her ACIE grant, Rosenzweig will create Communication Skills for Acute Care Nurse Practitioner Students , a student skills workshop using stereotypical patients—actors taught to display the communication needs to which students must respond. Using standard scenarios that would occur in an acute care setting, these actors will be trained to recognize when a student doesn’t respond appropriately and to give one-on-one feedback to that student. For example, a student might talk to family members in the intensive care unit waiting room about the prognosis for a seriously ill patient. In this scripted scenario, the pseudo family members will feign uncertainty, forcing the student to analyze how effectively she has communicated with them. Subsequently, from lecture material presented before the workshop and the ensuing feedback from the actors, the student will recognize empathetic communication skills for a family in that difficult situation. The workshop will be incorporated into an existing skills laboratory in a course, Management of Complex Health Problems of the Acutely and Critically Ill Adult . “We want students to look at this as an important clinical skill that they need to keep working on to develop proficiency,” says Rosenzweig. Most of the funding will be used to develop the scenarios and train the patient/actors, and the entire project will be done in collaboration with the School of Medicine. If the workshops prove beneficial in pre- and post-evaluations, they may be continued with implementation of a student laboratory fee. | |||||||||||||||||
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A newsletter devoted to the support of teaching and learning at the University of Pittsburgh |
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