A Solution to Student Nurse Clinical Rotation Cancellations: Online Clinical Replacement Simulation Program by NovEx and Dr. Patricia Benner

Presented in partnership with NovEx and the California Simulation Alliance

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced universities and colleges to cancel student nurse clinical rotations and mandate online-only instruction.  Without completing this requisite, student nurses risk failing to graduate.  This will have a significant impact on the workforce and institutions that rely on these graduates to fill vacancies.

In response to this critical need, HealthImpact’s California Simulation Alliance (CSA) has partnered with NovEx Novice to Expert Learning, LLC, to provide an online, immersive MedSurg clinical replacement simulation to universities and colleges across the United States.

The NovEx-Benner Advantage

NovEx, an online clinical replacement simulation programs by Dr. Patricia Benner offers several advantages compared to most educational and clinical courses.

For Students

• NovE-cases are “unfolding” authentic clinical simulation cases with real patient presentations, data, and responses.
• NovE-cases provide rich opportunities for students to enter patients’ rooms as the nurse and clinically care for them.
• Students may reenter the patient situations for deeper learning and for remediation if needed.
• Students provide extensive care that includes individualized patient interventions: highest priority and urgent collaborative interventions, comfort care, symptom management, safety and preventative inventions, and patient education.
• Students are alerted immediately to any errors in their responses, including problems related to urgency and/or priority of actions.
• Students may work alone, in small groups, or in large groups as assigned by the faculty.

For Faculty

• Faculty have a wide variety of NovE-case patients to select from to form assignments, focusing on the most prevalent patient groups nationally who require care.
• NovEx is robust enough to accommodate common student learning objectives such as, but not limited to, conducting patient assessments, implementing nursing interventions, developing clinical reasoning and judgment, ongoing evaluation of care, and providing patient education.
• Faculty can assign their own institution’s SBAR, concept maps or care plans, and journaling as supplemental learning activities to each of the NovE-cases.
• NovEx allows faculty to track student progress and provides real-time alerts to the faculty when a student commits a serious error.
• NovEx Analytics reports enable faculty to pinpoint knowledge gaps and problems in student’s clinical performance early so that immediate coaching to improve their patient safety and performance.
• NovEx situates students in their clinicals to develop clinical thinking and reasoning skills and to better prepare students to become practice-ready. NovEx does not present questions to your students; instead, as in real life, they must develop recognition skills to guide their judgment.
• NovEx’s focus on early warning signals and intervention has resulted in consistently improved patient safety outcomes and reduced failures-to-rescue.

Student Learning Objectives

Dr. Benner has reviewed example student learning objectives and matched them to the functionality in NovEx.  Please download the handout here.

Comparison to Other Online Clinical Replacement Simulation Programs

Click here to download the Clinical Comparison Chart.

Courses

MedSurg Clinical I (MSCI) Rotation
This clinical “rotation” is intended for Junior Level students to gain experience assessing, diagnosing, planning, implementing, and evaluating patients across conditions (see Table). Students gain access to 25 or 50 NovE-cases. Faculty can assign the most appropriate patients for their students. Additionally, an Advanced Clinical I Patient Group is provided as the last module to improve deep and situated learning while teaching clinical thinking and reasoning.

MedSurg Clinical II (MSCII) Rotation
This clinical “rotation” is intended for Senior Level students to learn and care for more complex patient situations. To be practice-ready, students must learn to compare and contrast similar situations. The 25 or 50 NovE-Cases in MedSurg Clinical II Rotation provide higher-level challenges to advance their development. Additionally, an Advanced Clinical II module is provided at the end to ensure students gain essential experience prior to entry into practice after graduation.

Fundamentals Clinical Rotation
This clinical “rotation” is intended for Entry Level students to learn which patients and when to use the fundamentals procedures they learned. Procedures are commonly learned outside the context of a patient’s authentic situation. NovEx provides 11 NovE-Cases that focus on helping students recognize what situations call for the use of particular procedures and when procedures are clinically needed, rather than on the step-by-step teaching of a specific procedure, which can be found in their Fundamentals textbooks. Fundamental NovE-Cases engage students to begin clinically thinking and reasoning upon entry into their nursing education.

View a short video here