The development of critical thinking and decision-making skills is essential to link knowledge to practice in prelicensure nursing education. Immersive virtual reality (VR) is a teaching modality that provides students with an interactive way to develop their knowledge and skills. Faculty at a large mid-Atlantic university developed an innovative strategy to deploy immersive VR in a senior-level advanced laboratory technologies course with 110 students. Implementation of this approach to VR was intended to augment clinical learning in a safe learning environment.
Background:
Academic nursing has a long history of partnering with practice-based settings to provide clinical learning experiences for nursing students; however, these placements are not easily obtained, especially in pediatrics.
Approach:
A freestanding academic pediatric hospital and 3 academic nursing programs collaborated to provide clinical practice to nursing students hired in a practice-based internship program. A second aim was to pilot a best practice clinical immersion framework to provide academic credit to bachelor of science in nursing (BSN) students using a shared clinical syllabus and e-learning platform.
Outcomes:
Sixteen nursing students successfully completed the program; 11 (68.7%) completed the pre- and postevaluation with significant (P < .05) changes in scores for 7 of the 20 questions.
Conclusion:
This best practice clinical immersion framework provided a strategy for obtaining clinical practice and academic credit, demonstrating the potential of innovative practice-academic partnerships. Further, this framework can be easily adapted in other practice-academic partnerships in all clinical areas.
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