Background: Concerns are documented regarding new-to-practice nurses' preparedness for professional practice (Benner, 2015; Jessee, 2021). The National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN) acknowledged errors that occur in inpatient settings may be preventable if nurses make decisions with sound clinical judgment (Nursing, 2017; Silvestre & Spector, 2023). Nursing knowledge and clinical skills grow more complex in practice requiring new-to-practice nurses to implement advanced problem-solving, and clinical reasoning (Baker et al., 2021). Educational strategies must focus more on experiential learning rather than on simple recall. Thus, promoting applying knowledge in real-life practice. An increasing number of studies have been conducted assessing clinical judgment related to medication administration (Klenke-Borgmann et al., 2021; Lee & Wessol, 2022) but few have studied clinical judgment using video simulation of complex situations such as failure to rescue.
Materials and Methods: A non-experimental, repeat measure (two-session) where nursing students in their senior 1st and 2nd semesters viewed a video simulation of a nurse caring for a declining acute stroke patient. At designated time-points, students completed a reflective journal based on Tanner’s Clinical Judgment Model; writing down what they noticed, their interpretations, how they should respond, and reflected on the nurse’s evaluation of the patient in the video.
Results: Interim analysis shows senior nursing students can list clinical manifestations of a declining stroke patient; however, they struggle to identify the same clinical manifestations when presented in video format.
Conclusions: Incorporating simulated scenarios may provide new-to-practice nurses with experiential learning to care for complex neuroscience patients effectively.
