NONPF 40th Annual Meeting
The Use of Standardized Patients to Facilitate Critical Thinking of the APRN Student in the Primary Care Academic Setting
Title: The Use of Standardized Patients to Facilitate Critical Thinking of the APRN Student in the Primary Care Academic Setting.
Background: The use of standardized patients is a method to objectively evaluate clinical competency and diagnostic reasoning prior to the student practicing in the “real” world. Incorporating standardized patients into the academic setting offers a different approach to the customary teaching method. The method allows for synthesizing didactic information and direct application of knowledge into the controlled clinical setting. Standardized patients offer practical teaching and alternative evaluation methods for student’s clinical competency.
Problem: Nurse Educators often battle with whether advanced practice nursing students are adequately prepared for the clinical setting. Although the literature supports the use of standardized patients with positive feedback for learning, standardized patients have been under-utilized in graduate nursing programs -especially in the family nurse practitioner academic setting.
Purpose: The purpose of this presentation is to describe the implementation of standardized patients in the primary care academic setting, the experiences of the advanced practice nursing students involved in the care of the standardized patient, as well as the evaluation process utilized as a substitute of clinical visit evaluation.
Results: Standardized patients were used in the didactic lab experience of two primary adult courses in an APRN-FNP program. Each standardized patient was assigned three students; a clinician, preceptor, and a family member. Each participant had a scripted role that required ad lib information based on learned information. The family nurse practitioner students evaluated their experiences with standardized patients and found that the scenarios challenged their critical thinking skills and added value to their diagnostic reasoning.