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Nursing, Social Work and Criminal Justice Students Collaborate in Simulation Experience
Roberts Wesleyan College students studying nursing, social work and criminal justice benefitted from a simulation-based learning experience on April 22. The focus of this innovative hands-on event was on learning and improving skills through constructive feedback in an interprofessional setting for competencies including collaborative communication between professions, student lessons learned and teamwork.
During a simulation, criminal justice, social work and nursing students care for patients, who are actors and programmable manikins that can exhibit medical symptoms and social complexities. The students participated in one of three identical simulations with multiple patients and family members in a busy Emergency Department. This experience gives them further experience in navigating interprofessional communication in a healthcare setting using challenging, realistic situations with diversity of patients. In addition nursing alumni and community members volunteered as hospital staff and standardized patients. The part of hospital security was played by Roberts Campus Safety officers.
Simulations, with role playing. create an opportunity for learning, observation and reflective discussion. “This event gives students further experience navigating interprofessional communication in a healthcare setting using challenging, realistic situations within a diverse population of patients and family members,” said Sr. Admin Director of Clinical Education, Grace Stiles. “The collaboration between professions and majors, since this is across multiple disciplines, is a fairly unique experience in the undergraduate setting,” she said.
Alyson VanCamp’22 (Nursing) played the role of the charge Nurse in the first simulation.
“I am looking forward to a real-life emergency department simulation because this isn’t something we get to do every day and they weren’t able to do it last year. The setup is really cool where they made the whole thing look like an emergency department and we get to deal with real-life patients. I think it will be a great learning experience for all of us,” said VanCamp.
“There are some patients who may have an investigation going on, so I think it will be a good experience to work with criminal justice and social work students. Hopefully, we can learn from them and they can learn a little bit from us too.”
Due to the pandemic, the last large-scale event was held in 2019, in 2021 the event was a smaller-scale with nursing and social work only. Roberts is delighted to once again bring students from multiple areas of study to interact as they would in a medical setting.
Approximately 40 undergraduate nursing students, eight undergraduate and graduate social work and 3 undergraduate criminal justice students participated in the event. Mercy Flight as well as several faculty supported the event including:
- Nursing Faculty: Laura Coles, Bob Dorman, Sharon Kurtz and Sara Claypool
- Criminal Justice Faculty: Glenn Grana
- Social Work Faculty: Brenda Mcquillan, Leanne Walters and Rebecca Draper
Students benefit from understanding how important their skills will be as future professional workers (social work, nursing and criminal justice), from learning through interprofessional collaboration and from receiving valuable feedback on their skills set that will allow them to grow from the experience and envision what their future career will look like in their chosen fields.
Watch the local media coverage:
Rochesterfirst.com and the broadcast story will air today at 4:30pm. Here’s the link to the online story to share with the team: Roberts Wesleyan simulates full-scale emergency room for students
Story aired on 4/22): WROC-CBS @ 4:30 PM
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