Cultivating Students' Practice of Prayer with Patients.

ABSTRACT: Educating prelicensure nurses about the positive outcomes of prayer can improve the potential for nurses to develop their skill and readiness to pray with or for patients as is appropriate and ethical. When nursing students learn to pray with their patients and families, the trusting component of the nurse-patient relationship becomes strengthened. As faculty and preceptors role-model praying with patients, students can begin to develop competency in providing spiritual care.

Connecting the dots: Bridging virtual to in-person physical assessment.

When restrictions imposed by COVID-19 prevented prelicensure nursing students from practicing skills in the simulation center, the faculty designed a plan to bridge the gap from virtual to in-person skill performance for physical assessments. The faculty anticipated an inadequacy of head-to-toe assessment skills related to the lack of face-to-face clinical. Therefore, the faculty used the Plan-Do-Study-Act model (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2020) for quality improvement to address the skill performance issue. The plan used colored adhesive "garage sale" dots to identify anatomical landmarks to help students with correct stethoscope placement during their first in-person simulation after a virtual semester. Pre- and post-tests were administered to assess confidence in assessment skills. Using this method on standardized patients in simulation, nursing students reported increased confidence in stethoscope placement. Students of all healthcare disciplines could benefit from the economical dotting process to learn correct stethoscope placement.

The critical difference assignment: an innovative instructional method.

Nurse educators are faced with the challenge of developing and evaluating learning methods that promote knowledge acquisition, problem solving, and the development of clinical judgment to meet today's expectations of new graduates. Clinical judgment is at the heart of decision making and drives nursing action. It encompasses perceptions and intellectual processing of information through mental operations of reasoning, resulting in appropriate actions. An instructional method, entitled the Critical Difference Assignment, aimed at developing clinical judgment has been developed and piloted at a southwestern university. This instructional method requires students in small groups to engage in intellectual processing of case study information using mental operations of reasoning to discriminate between two case studies through a process of comparing and contrasting the data.