Development of Simulation Scenarios for Family Nurse Practitioner Preparation

Innovation and technology have expanded the options for teaching and learning in nursing education. Human patient simulation (HPS) provides the ability to produce clinical experiences encompassing the affective, cognitive, and psychomotor domains, all essential to advance nursing practice. HPS also provides the opportunity to evaluate all students using the same scenario under the same controlled conditions. HPS is currently being used for in undergraduate nursing programs as well as medical and PA schools. However, most scenarios for HSP are acute care (i.e. hospital, emergency room) based. Thus HPS has generated a need for reliable and valid tools to guide in the development of scenarios for use with graduate students, specifically Family Nurse Practitioners. This project is a part of a larger research project: “Incorporating Simulation in the Preparation of Family Nurse Practitioners”. It was conducted as a part of the Health Informatics Technology Scholar Program offered through NLN and five universities. In this project, nurse practitioner students completed two clinical HPS, a scenario in their first adult health clinical course and one more challenging scenario in their final course. Students’ performances on the HPS scenarios were videotaped and the tapes were reviewed for role competency using the NONPF competencies for nurse practitioners, QSEN quality and safety guidelines and clinical decision making using the Lasater Clinical Decision Making Rubric. The development of HPS scenarios could benefit nurse practitioner programs in validating the value of simulation in the education of nurse practitioner students. A key aspect of this project is the development, validation and evaluation of ambulatory based HPS scenarios for graduate students, specifically Family Nurse Practitioners.