Enhancing competency-based assessment: Implementing oral boards in nursing education.

ABSTRACT: Competency-based education, pivotal in nursing programs, emphasizes learning methods over knowledge accumulation, integrating ongoing assessments for performance and outcomes. The American Association College of Nursing introduced competency-based education, urging educators to explore diverse assessment methods. This article explores the implementation of mock oral boards as an assessment method to synchronize performance standards with competencies in nursing education, specifically in preparing nurse practitioner students for clinical rotations.

Online simulation-based education in graduate education: Initial implementation and content revision description.

Treating those with mental illness frequently requires collaboration among health care providers from different disciplines as well as easy access to care. Neither interprofessional collaboration (IPC) nor accessible care can be assumed to automatically occur or be available in the busy health care environment. Early and deliberate exposure of graduate students in health care disciplines to interprofessional educational activities is imperative to strengthen IPC. Empirical evidence supports the linkage between interprofessional education (IPE) early-on in training and IPC. Additionally, early and focused training of graduate students in health care disciplines to telebehavioral health (TBH) can help promote care access. The current literature supports TBH as an effective treatment approach that enhances access to care. Thus, the creation of educational activities for graduate students in health care disciplines that use early exposure and training in both: IPE and TBH approaches to enhance IPC can position future providers to provide quality patient care, especially given the COVID-19 pandemic implications on health care and education. This article describes the authors' experience in implementing and evaluating an interprofessional, simulation-based educational activity in psychopharmacology using a TBH approach in graduate nursing and psychology students. This quality improvement process used the plan-do-study-act cycle of continuous quality improvement to establish the initial implementation and the 11 steps of the International Nursing Association for Clinical Simulation and Learning standards of best practice to then refine this educational activity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Leadership After a Crisis: The Application of Psychological First Aid.

Nursing leaders have voiced concern about the health and well-being of nurses and other healthcare providers during the recovery phase of disaster response after the coronavirus pandemic. There is much that can be learned from the experiences of our military colleagues. Behavioral health military nurses serving on readiness teams have educated leaders on how to apply psychological first aid (PFA) within their units during the recovery phase of disasters. This article will describe how nursing leaders can use PFA to enhance psychological support and resilience in their staff.

Caring for military families: Understanding their unique stressors.

Military families are often faced with unique stressors that civilian families do not have to deal with, such as deployment, geographic separation, and frequent relocation. When an NP is providing care for a military family, it is important that these unique stressors are discussed and understood. NPs can employ the Causal Uncertainty Model to encourage effortful cognition and support family attributes to ameliorate the negative effects of the stressors these families may face.

Using Simulation in a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner Doctoral Program.

The use and effectiveness of simulation with standardized patients in undergraduate and graduate nursing education programs is well documented. Simulation has been primarily used to develop health assessment skills. Evidence supports using simulation and standardized patients in psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner (PMHNP) programs is useful in developing psychosocial assessment skills. These interactions provide individualized and instantaneous clinical feedback to the student from faculty, peers, and standardized patients. Incorporating simulation into advanced practice psychiatric-mental health nursing curriculum allows students to develop the necessary requisite skills and principles needed to safely and effectively provide care to patients. There are no documented standardized processes for using simulation throughout a doctor of nursing practice PMHNP curriculum. The purpose of this article is to describe a framework for using simulation with standardized patients in a PMHNP curriculum. Students report high levels of satisfaction with the simulation experience and believe that they are more prepared for clinical rotations. Faculty feedback indicates that simulated clinical scenarios are a method to ensure that each student experiences demonstrate a minimum standard of competency ahead of clinical rotations with live patients. Initial preceptor feedback indicates that students are more prepared for clinical practice and function more independently than students that did not experience this standardized clinical simulation framework.

Compassion fatigue in military healthcare teams.

Since the onset of the Iraq war and Afghanistan conflicts, military healthcare teams have had increasing exposure to the traumatic effects of caring for wounded warriors, leading to a phenomenon termed compassion fatigue. The purpose of this integrative review was to develop a proposed definition for compassion fatigue in support of these teams. There is no current standardized formal definition, and this lack of clarity can inhibit intervention. Seven main themes evolved from the literature review and were integrated with the core elements of the Bandura Social Cognitive Theory Model as the first step in developing a uniformed definition.