Nursing Skills Validation: Doing the Math on Faculty Time

How does GoReact help you save time? That’s the question we asked nurse educators at the start of the fall semester.

We got some great responses about how GoReact makes nursing skills validation faster and more impactful—and how reusable video feedback creates efficiencies for showing every student the right way to perform any skill.

But the answers that caught our eye didn’t just tell us how GoReact saved time for nursing ed programs—but how much time. Here are two “story problems” from nurse educators that solve for the equation: Video + Feedback = Time Savings.

UWA instructors completed their nursing skills validations 1 hour and 18 minutes faster using GoReact. See the results! Click To Tweet

Subtract Downtime, Add Playback Controls

Dr. Dara Murray, Assistant Professor of Nursing at the University of West Alabama, reported that before adopting GoReact, UWA instructors were averaging 24–36 hours per semester validating up to four skills per student. On the high end, that came to 9 hours per skill.

According to Dara, “It was incumbent upon nursing faculty to find a solution to provide students with quality instruction and feedback while decreasing time spent in validation.”

After adopting GoReact, she said faculty spent significantly less time conducting their nursing skills validation. This decrease was quantified by a UWA research study that compared faculty work hours using two methods—face-to-face evaluation and GoReact—to validate one skill.

Using face-to-face evaluation, instructors in Group A spent 254 minutes (4 hours, 14 minutes) validating peripheral intravenous catheter insertion. Instructors in Group B spent 176 minutes (2 hours, 56 minutes) validating the same skill with GoReact.

Results showed that Group B completed a nursing skills validation 1 hour and 18 minutes faster using GoReact. The study identified two possible reasons for the time savings:

• Elimination of non-productive time. For Group A, students were scheduled to arrive at the lab in 15–20 minute increments. If students arrived late or finished early, faculty were left waiting. In contrast, faculty in Group B had the flexibility to complete evaluations at a time, place, and pace that was convenient for them—and with no downtime between students.

• Faster viewing with playback controls. Group B faculty also had the option to play videos in GoReact at 1.3x, 1.5x, 1.7x, and 2x the recorded speed. So if they watched videos at the maximum speed, they could view a 5-minute video in half the time.

 

A New Meaning of Coefficient

LoraLynn Allen, Clinical/Simulation Coordinator at Utah State University, reported that switching all nursing skills validation from in-person to video-based evaluation with GoReact has changed how, when, and where instructors assess student skills. More importantly, it’s changed how many instructors are needed to evaluate the same number of students.

“GoReact allows instructors to be more efficient in grading,” she said, “but also to take less time getting all the students passed off.”

Now, instead of scheduling 6–10 instructors to evaluate students face-to-face during an 8-hour day, USU divides student videos among three instructors and gives them a week for review.

Here’s how three nursing instructors using GoReact can be more efficient than 6–10 instructors in a lab: