Nursing Education
Nursing students are required to master a long list of core competencies. But they can’t begin to provide effective patient care without first mastering teamwork and communication skills. The challenge is finding time for students to practice these skills without increasing faculty workload or hours in the simulation lab.
The go-to solution for a growing number of nursing programs is video assessment. Video gives students flexibility to practice and demonstrate communication skills virtually. Combined with powerful feedback tools, video also enables clinical instructors to observe and assess student skills faster.
Here’s how you can use video assessment to improve the teamwork and communication skills of every student in your program, while saving valuable time on skills checks, debriefings, and more.
Just like IV insertion or NG tube placement, communication and teamwork are practical skills that can only be learned through experience.
But with clinical learning sites stretched to capacity, and more students enrolling online, every nursing program needs a virtual place and platform where students can practice interpersonal skills and get feedback to help them improve. When video assessment is the platform, experiential learning can happen anywhere.
Here’s how it works: You assign students to practice and demonstrate communication skills on video—anything from taking a health history to using the SBAR tool to brief other members of the healthcare team.
Individually or in groups, students use any device with a camera to record their skills in the lab, at home, or wherever they are. You and other clinical instructors then observe and give feedback asynchronously at a convenient time and place.
Watch this short video clip to see how Dr. Ali Galindo uses video assessment as a way for nursing students to practice taking a health history.
When you evaluate nursing skills using the old-school method (a pen and clipboard), your only options for providing feedback are verbal and written critiques. Both methods have drawbacks for clinical learning, especially for evaluating communication skills.
Verbal feedback is personalized and contextual, but given in the moment, it interrupts role-play exercises or skills demonstrations, which is stressful for students and makes feedback harder to understand and remember.
Written feedback is more comprehensive and provides a takeaway for students to reference later, but it lacks the timeliness of verbal feedback. It’s also an inefficient way to evaluate every skill demonstrated by every student in your course or program.
Video assessment provides a faster and more effective option: multimodal feedback that’s automatically time stamped and synced to precise moments in student videos.
Multimodal feedback encompasses a range of feedback tools—text, audio, video, marker sets, rubrics, and attached documents or media files. Because feedback itself is a form of communication, it’s critical to provide the right feedback at the right time in the right way to maximize skill development.
Video assessment gives you the power to record audio and video responses (whether personalized for each student or prepared as “canned” responses for recurring feedback), so you can show students how to improve their communication skills rather than telling them what they did right or wrong in written comments.
Using this method, your students can practice and demonstrate any type of interpersonal interaction (verbal, written, behavior, body language, touch, and emotion), and you can then model effective skills for team and one-on-one communication in a clinical setting.
Video supports self-evaluation and self-reflection better than any other learning tool because it enables nursing students to observe and reflect on their own performance from an outside perspective. That’s why video assessment makes simulation debriefing more meaningful.
Using the same feedback tools available to instructors, students can evaluate videos of simulation activities focused on teamwork and communication, critically examining their role in the outcomes, and developing the reflective practice techniques they’ll need throughout their nursing careers.
Beyond self-evaluation, critiquing their peers’ performance following a simulation activity allows students to work collaboratively and learn from each other, while also improving their ability to give and receive feedback.
Video further enhances the debriefing process by providing an objective record of what happened during the simulation activity, which allows students to more easily see and reflect on their actions. Seeing evidence of their mistakes provides motivation for improvement, and seeing their successes builds confidence.
Before your students can begin practicing and demonstrating teamwork and communication skills, they need to understand the tools and best practices nurses use to communicate with patients, family members, and other healthcare providers.
You can use video assessment in didactic courses to facilitate group or one-on-one discussions and for comment-only and stimulus assignments:
Comment-only assignments require students to evaluate and give feedback on a video (used to check for comprehension and fine-tune observation/evaluation skills).
Stimulus assignments require students to watch and respond to a video or other media prompt. Students record a response in the time allowed (by answering a question or demonstrating a skill), and the recording is automatically synced to the media prompt for easy review and grading.
From therapeutic communication techniques to shared decision-making about patient care, teamwork and communication skills are now being taught and evaluated by nursing programs everywhere using video assessment. It provides a safe, effective, flexible, and cost-efficient way to help your students connect knowledge to practice as they transition from in-person or virtual classrooms to clinical learning.
Request a GoReact demo and we’ll show you how to use video + feedback to teach and evaluate nursing teamwork and communication skills in any learning environment—online or in person.
