Speaker: Traci Sims, Clinical Professor, Georgia State University
What new learning strategies & resources have you implemented to prepare nurses with stronger skills in leadership, well-being, & self-care?
Traci Sims: Our faculty recognized that in order to help our students with leadership skills and self-care and wellness and resilience, we as a faculty needed to increase our own knowledge of these skills and model these skills. So we brought in an expert who reminded us of the resources our university already had. And so as a faculty, we began to look at those resources and model these behaviors to our students. Then we began very intentionally, how could we thread these skills throughout our program? We focused on self-care and how we could intentionally encourage our students to practice self-care.
What AACN Essentials competencies are you preparing nurses with these new learning strategies?
Traci Sims: We have a very diverse student body as well as a community that we serve. We want to start first as a faculty to model respect for diversity, equity, and inclusion. We want our students to recognize individual differences. We believe that that starts with having our students pay attention and reflect on self-awareness and practice self-care. We've also adopted a new clinical judgment model, so that we can equip our students with knowledge to build on.
What have been the greatest successes or surprises you have had during the implementation of these new learning strategies?
Traci Sims: As important as it is to recognize individual differences, we as a faculty and our student body, as we began to implement new strategies, we had some successes and surprises when we recognize that we all had a common goal. We want our community to be healthy and that means we need to have healthy nurses, emotionally and physically. So, as important as it is to implement strategies to help them stay healthy, we also wanted to increase their knowledge, and our student body seemed to be excited to not only focus on being emotionally healthy, but also to see the importance of implementing a critical judgment model.
What partnerships or collaborations are your nursing school leveraging to extend & sustain the integration of your school’s new curriculum?
Traci Sims: Our school of nursing is very grateful that we are surrounded by several partnerships that have the same goals that we have and see the value of having a healthy nursing workforce. In one partnership, we are working together with the community resilience model and this model is focusing on stress and trauma-informed care and helping our nurses be able to learn specific skills for self-awareness and how to stay emotionally healthy. We're very thankful for these partnerships to encourage our nurses to remain healthy as they stay in the workforce.
How do you envision these new skills and competencies benefiting nurses entering professional practice and the healthcare system as a whole?
Traci Sims: As we continue to look at the multiple reasons that cause our nursing shortage, the literature is revealing some interesting connections between nurses having emotional well-being and emotional intelligence and how this can affect patient outcomes. As important as it is for us as schools of nursing to help our students have critical judgment skills and a firm knowledge base, we are finding that it is just as important for our students to be emotionally healthy. We encourage our students to remember why did they go into nursing and keep that before them as they face challenges. But also during these challenges, to remember the skills that we are teaching them throughout nursing school: how to cope in stressful situations.
