Developing Communication Skills that Support a Healthy Work Environment through Unfolding Simulations

Communication is a critical skill of nurses and is essential to provide safe patient care. It is important to provide opportunities for nursing students to practice communication skills to ensure safe patient care in the clinical setting. This podcast and article describe how faculty at Oregon Health & Science University developed and implemented unfolding simulations to allow students to practice having those difficult conversations in a safe environment.

During a 2-hour skills lab, faculty incorporated a game to enhance students' retention and engagement. Each hour focused on a nursing skill that the students needed to master. During the session on wounds and sterile dressing changes, the faculty introduced a relay race. Students were placed into small groups with each group being guided by an individual faculty member. In this podcast, Nicole Ogle discusses student engagement, communication, collaboration, and fun to help students build critical thinking and confidence in basic skills.

To better align writing instruction with workplace expectations, an annotated bibliography assignment in an evidence-based practice course was replaced with a professional email assignment that intentionally preserves all core evidence components. Students first review examples of effective and ineffective professional emails. They then receive a scenario-based manager's email describing a common unit practice issue, such as patient falls, along with a randomized controlled trial, and draft an email to the manager summarizing the study's purpose, design, population, key findings, and credibility, including limitations and generalizability. Whitnie Willis explains this assignment in the podcast and teaching tip.

Academic support programs are used in prelicensure nursing education to improve retention, progression, and equity. However, the literature is inconsistent and fragmented. In this podcast and article, Dr. Suzanne Sutton discusses the outcomes of her scoping review on academic support programs. Common interventions were mentoring, tutoring, coaching, and psychosocial support, and schools of nursing typically evaluated retention, course performance, NCLEX pass rates, and student engagement.

Nursing students often lack the leadership and communication skills needed to serve as innovative change agents in health care. Undergraduate curricula rarely emphasize these skills. Dr. Andrew Richards discusses how integrating pitches, the 4th P, into nursing education broadens dissemination and strengthens communication, advocacy, and innovation across undergraduate and graduate programs. Read their article and share with colleagues: it is open access.  

Community-based service-learning projects provide an effective framework for developing leadership skills. Senior nursing students designed and implemented a project in which they assembled and distributed disaster-preparedness kits and provided in-person educational sessions at multiple community sites. Students managed budgeting, purchased supplies, communicated with partner organizations, and created teaching materials. Drs. Beth Tremblay and Janice Evans Hawkins discuss how these real-world experiences serve as learning opportunities to practice delegation, organization, and teamwork. They share more details in their teaching tip.

Real-time instructor feedback is a key component in nursing education, yet the phrasing of feedback prompts is rarely discussed. At the end of each class throughout the semester, the author asks nursing students: What is one area of opportunity for my teaching today? The phrase "area of opportunity" is intentional and tends to change how students respond. Dr. Valerie Wright discusses the power of this single question in obtaining feedback on teaching in this podcast and teaching tip.

Learning and professional growth are embedded throughout the undergraduate curriculum. Beginning with the first-semester professional practice course, students are introduced to the professional nurse role through key concepts such as practice excellence, collaboration, and innovation. Early in the course, faculty observed students struggling to understand the nurse's professional role and the importance of these concepts. In this podcast and teaching tip, Dr. Jennifer King presents a teaching strategy to engage students with material whose importance was unclear and help them think critically and build confidence.

Understanding how the brain learns has the potential to strengthen student engagement and learning. One practical framework for operationalizing neuro-based learning is the 4A learning sequence (Anchor, Add, Apply, Away). This simple neuro-friendly teaching sequence is well-suited to nursing education because it can mirror the cognitive processes that support clinical reasoning. The authors explain neuro/brain-based learning and how to use the 4A sequence in this podcast and article.  

Critical thinking has long been valued in nursing education and is a foundational element of clinical judgment. Discernment is often viewed as a particular type of critical thinking that involves making distinctions, including distinguishing fact from truth. In this podcast, the author (Miriam Abbott) describes discernment activities ("accuracy assignments") that she integrated into 3 online nursing courses. She shares her findings in the podcast and article.