Instilling professional attitudes in nearly qualified student nurses using the methods of reality TV.

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Over the last few years, there have been a variety of complaints from a variety of bodies about poor standards of care and the professional attitudes of nurses especially in relation to the dignity of patients, compassion and empathy. Whether these complaints have any real substance is open to debate but the sheer number of complaints and the fact that nurse education – fairly or not – is often implicated in these complaints implies a need for nurse educators to (re)emphasise the importance of professional behaviour and attitudes to students. Students need to have a clear understanding of concepts such as ‘fitness to practise’, ‘competence’ and ‘professional behaviour’. Fitness to practise, however, is a very dry subject to teach. We outlined an ‘active learning’ (Bonwell & Eison 1991) approach to teaching fitness to practise that we deliver to third year nursing diploma students. The approach involves the use of reality-TV style audience voting, the Countdown clock timer, and the ‘heated debates’ of daytime TV. Students are presented with real fitness to practise cases (deliberately chosen because they are topical and/or controversial) and are asked to vote, via electronic voting handsets, what they would have done had they been a member of the relevant Fitness to Practise or Professional Conduct panel. We presented clear evidence (from student evaluations and elsewhere) that our approach has engaged students in learning, even with groups as large as 300 students. However, we have limited data about its effectiveness in actually instilling professional attitudes. Within the session we sought to explore with delegates ways in which nurse educators might attempt to measure the effectiveness of such innovative approaches to learning and the potential pitfalls involved.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationNetworking for Healthcare Education (NET) Conference
Subtitle of host publicationStudents, Teachers and Service Users (Theme Paper-Group 1)
Place of PublicationCambridge UK
Publication statusPublished - 5 Sept 2012

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