Nursing School

September 17th, 2012
Jenna Fischer

Yuri Arcurs/ Fotolia

A pilot mentoring program based in Nevada is hoping to accomplish at least two things. First, help nurses figure out how to take their “book learning” from nursing school and put it into practice. The program also aims to help the experiences nurses who will serve as mentors to rekindle their own excitement about the profession.

The program is called the Nevada Nurses Association Mentoring project, and is sponsored by a grant from the American Nurses Association, according to this article on Nurse.com. Nurses with at least three years’ experience and newly licensed nurses each complete profiles and then are matched according to compatibility. Then the mentor-and-mentee pairs communicate via email about any questions or concerns the mentees may have.

The time commitment is minimal — the article states that only 15 minutes a week for 8 weeks is required from the mentor nurses.

Nurses who have just graduated and are facing the real-life challenges of their first shifts often are left “without the parachute” of a classroom environment, said Denise Ogletree McGuinn, RN, APN, who is one of the mentors and the director of the program. “It’s a critical time,” she said. “They need someone who can take them by the hand and tell them what they’re feeling is normal.”

Networking can be difficult, especially in Nevada where vast open spaces separate large population centers. Nurses with questions about a particular specialty may have to travel a long way to mingle with someone in their field.

For experienced nurses it’s a chance to remember why they chose nursing in the first place and an opportunity to “rediscover our joy,” McGuinn said. For struggling nurses, she said having someone to turn to who is not a boss or co-worker can be “like a hot bowl of macaroni and cheese.”

By early September, 10 matches had been made and five mentors were awaiting mentees. McGuinn said they are hoping for at least 250 matches in the next month.

The hope of the program is not only to help nurses through the early years, but also to get them engaged in their profession and ready to help the people who come after them. “These are our leaders of tomorrow,” McGuinn said.

September 12th, 2012

Yuri Arcurs/ Fotolia

An interesting question was raised online in Nursing Times: Do nurses have time for reflective practice?

Reflective practice can be defined as reflecting on experiences in order to critically evaluate what you do well and how you might improve your personal nursing practice (i.e. skills, communication, interpersonal relationships, professionalism, beliefs, values and behavior). It involves the process of critical thinking. Nursing students are encouraged to perform reflective practice throughout their nursing education; in fact, reflective practice is often a formal component of nursing education in the form of journaling or other forms of writing that are evaluated by nursing instructors.

What happens when we graduate from nursing school and enter the “real world”? How many of us take the time to reflect critically on our nursing practice? How many of us have the time to practice critical reflection?

Some might argue that nurses are not allowed the time to practice critical reflection in the workplace. Many nurses are overworked, with too many patients and too few staff members available. Many nurses are focused on whether they will have time to break for lunch or visit the washroom, let alone take the time to engage in reflective practice.

However, reflective practice does not need to be as formal as it was in nursing school. Most of us engage in reflective behavior regarding our experiences as nurses on a daily basis, but don’t recognize that that is what we are actually doing. For example, when conflict arises with a patient’s family member, we may spend time thinking about how we responded to the family member’s criticism. We may take it a step further when we discuss the issue with our colleagues and ask their opinion about how we handled the situation, perhaps soliciting advice on how to better handle a similar situation in the future. We may grieve the loss of a patient to whom we had grown close, or dread the imminent loss, and spend time reflecting on how the relationship we formed with the patient was special or different from relationships with other patients, and why this particular patient moved us. We may engage in an informal debriefing session following a particularly difficult trauma in the ER, identifying ways to improve performance and what might have been done differently. These are all common scenarios and are examples of reflective practice, whether we think of them in that fashion or not.

The bottom line is that reflection does not need to be a formal process (although it can be if you prefer). As nurses, we constantly strive to become better practitioners. Just as formal continuing education is a requirement of the profession, so too is reflective practice. Reflection is a skill that we learn in nursing school that becomes engrained in our psyche.

We first learn the practice of critical reflection in the form of reflective activities and assignments that nursing instructors comment on, pointing out things we perhaps did not or would not have realized without someone’s greater experience. As we evolve in our ability to reflect critically in regards to our practice, our reflection becomes a reflex, a skill we have learned that we no longer think about consciously while performing, much like the physical skill of inserting an IV or taking a blood pressure reading.

As technology changes, nursing transforms its model of patient care. With the advent of personal digital assistants, smartphones, tablets and pocket-size computers, nursing has had to integrate new tools into its practice in order to provide better, safer patient care, improve patient outcomes, and communicate better with other members of the healthcare team.

The Institute of Medicine and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have released a landmark report, The Future of Nursing, Leading Change, Advancing Health, which issues recommendations for nurses to effect positive change in health care delivery. Each recommendation offers an opportunity to use IT tools to improve the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care.

Recommendation 1: Remove scope of practice barriers. Extending authority and reforming practice acts will enable nurses to receive incentive payments from Medicaid for “meaningful use of electronic health records” (EHRs) as provided in the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, which is part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Under the Act, nurses are classified as “eligible providers,” which means nurses can use EHRs to collect and exchange patient information, resulting in better care and outcomes.

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Recommendation 2: Expand opportunities for nurses to lead and diffuse collaborative improvement efforts. Nurses need to take a more active role as leaders of healthcare teams, whether in research, design of practice environments, or sharing best practices. When implementing new technologies, nurses should track the impact the changes have on delivery of care in order to provide positive and negative feedback to the design team.

Recommendation 3: Implement nurse residency programs. Whether a nurse has just received her license or has earned an advanced degree, nurses need time to master the skills and knowledge of a new role. Technology can assist nurses in learning new competencies by using electronic patient simulation tools, which require critical thinking skills and psychomotor skills while providing experience with using EHRs.

Recommendation 4: Increase proportion of nurses with BSN degree to 80 percent by 2020. This goal represents a 30 percent increase overall in the number of BSN-prepared nurses. Distance learning is a valuable means towards this end, given its flexibility. Distance learning also reduces the cost factor of higher education, which enables more students to take advantage of educational opportunities.

Recommendation 5: Double the number of nurses with a doctorate by 2020. The faculty shortage in U.S. nursing schools is responsible in part for the nursing shortage today. Again, technology can help by offering online education opportunities as well as providing opportunities for information-sharing and collaboration.

Recommendation 6: Ensure that nurses engage in lifelong learning. In order to stay current in their field, nurses need to learn new technologies and competencies and integrate them into their practice.

Recommendation 7: Prepare and enable nurses to lead change and advance health. All nurses need to embrace technology, whether it is being used at a patient’s bedside or in a nurse leadership position. The nurse informatician must take the lead in a strategic and operational role to bridge the gap standing between clinicians and technology. The nurse informatician gathers input from clinicians, designs an efficient workflow and tracks the results.

Recommendation 8: Build an infrastructure to collect and analyze healthcare workforce data. Data that is not organized in the best possible way wastes time, effort and money. Nurses need to keep an eye out for inefficiencies and either propose change themselves or seek out experts to keep an organization’s IT systems current.

The recommendations in this report have been a sort of call to action for the 3 million nurses in the U.S. to embrace and integrate health IT into their daily practice. The long-standing goal of health IT has always been to improve patient care and outcomes, but it can also affect nursing education, research, leadership and policy, ultimately improving nursing as an art and science.

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A health care professional may have the best possible technical skills, and encyclopedic knowledge, but one more element is needed to be truly effective: empathy.

Studies have shown that this important attribute has been declining amongst nursing and medical students. The benefits of empathy go far beyond the exam room. Greater empathy levels is associated with fewer medical errors, better patient outcomes, more satisfied patients, and fewer malpractice claims.

Traditionally, empathy has been thought to be inherent — you have it, or you don’t. This article in the New York Times looks at some of the new research that indicates that it can be taught.

Building on research over the last decade that has shown that empathetic observers have brain activity, heart rate and skin electrical conductance that mirror those of the person undergoing the emotional experience — observing a friend’s hand getting slammed in a car door, for example, causes us to flinch because an image of the accident gets mapped onto the pain and threat sensors in our own brain — Dr. Helen Riess, director of the Empathy and Relational Science Program in the department of psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, created a series of empathy “training modules” for doctors. The tools are designed to teach methods for recognizing key nonverbal cues and facial expressions in patients as well as strategies for dealing with one’s own physiologic responses to highly emotional encounters.

In one lesson, for example, doctors watch a video of a tense exam room interaction while a striking graphic sidebar records the electrical skin conductance of both patient and doctor, the mismatched spikes peaking as each person’s frustration with the other escalates. Another lesson walks doctors through a series of pictures of a patient whose face expresses anger, contempt, happiness, fear, surprise, disgust or sadness.

To test the effectiveness of the lessons, Dr. Riess and several of her colleagues enrolled about 100 doctors-in-training and asked their patients to evaluate their empathy, based on the doctor’s ability to make them feel at ease, show care and compassion and fully understand patient concerns. Half of the doctors then took part in three one-hour empathy training sessions.

Two months later, the researchers asked a second group of patients to evaluate all the doctors again. They found that the doctors who had taken the empathy classes showed significant improvements in their empathetic behavior, while those who had not actually got worse at empathizing with patients.

“People tend to believe that you are either born with empathy or not,” said Dr. Helen Riess, lead author of the study. “But empathy can be taught, and you can improve.”

Compared with their peers, doctors who went through the empathy course interrupted their patients less, maintained better eye contact and were better able to maintain their equanimity if patients became angry, frustrated or upset. They also appeared to develop resistance to the notorious “dehumanizing effects” of medical training. After the empathy classes, one physician who had complained about being burned out said, “I feel as though like I like my job again.”

Responses to this study have so far been enthusiastic, in part because it is one of the first to rely on patient evaluations of empathy rather than physician self-assessment. “The holy grail of this kind of research is whether patients think doctors are empathic, not whether the doctors think they are,” Dr. Riess said. She and her colleagues plan to expand their research and offer the training to more doctors, as well as to nurses, physician assistants and others.

“We are in a special place in the history of medicine,” she said. “We have the neurophysiology data that validates and helps move medicine back to a real balance between the science and the art.”

Curious to know whether the empathy course worked, I decided to try out what I had learned in researching this column. The next day at the hospital, I took extra care to sit down facing my patients and not a computer screen, to observe the changing expressions on their faces and to take note of the subtle gestures and voice modulations covered in the course. While I found it challenging at first to incorporate the additional information when my mind was already juggling possible diagnoses and treatment plans, eventually it became fun, a return to the kind of focused one-on-one interaction that drew me to medicine in the first place.

Just before leaving, one of the patients pulled me aside. “Thanks, Doc,” he said. “I have never felt so listened to before.”