Lecturer of Critical Care and Emergency Nursing, Department of Critical Care & Emergency Nursing, Faculty of Nursing, University of Alexandria, Egypt
The use of high-fidelity simulation as a substitute for traditional clinical learning experiences in nursing education has gained acceptance over the past decade. Unfortunately, there is little research evidence that demonstrates how well high-fidelity simulation assists students in acquiring and integrating knowledge, skills, and critical thinking into their knowledge base (Weaver, 2011). (1) Instead, most researches have focused on the confidence students’ gain after participating in simulation scenarios. (2 - 4) Therefore, this study was undertaken to compare between the effects of high fidelity simulation and traditional clinical instructions on nursing students’ knowledge and skills acquisition as evidenced by their performance on content-specific examinations as evidenced by their performance on content-specific examinations..
Randomized controlled trial was used to address the aim of this study. Fourth - year nursing students (n=38) were randomly distributed into two groups; experimental group, and control group. Subject domain was selected from the course syllabus and learning outcomes or variables that measured were knowledge and Skills.
The Simulator group showed significantly greater success (p < 0:05) in performing the selected procedures (40% vs 15%) when compared to the traditional instruction group. Additionally the simulator trained students had a significant performance advantage in term of the total time required to finish the procedures. Moreover, although, there was no significant difference in knowledge retention between the both groups, the simulation group appeared to retain the most (88.5%) and the traditional group the least (82.9%).
This study provides an evidence base that suggesting high fidelity simulation can be used as a viable substitute to traditional clinical instructions in nursing education.
High Fidelity Simulation, Nursing Education, Traditional Clinical Instruction, Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE)
