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| |  The Clinical Post Conference – A Few Guidelines
Updated
Jun 17, 2009 at 03:33 PM by VickyRN
The clinical post conference has a unique focus in nursing education: the student’s own behavior and experience. Ideally, it should provide a nurturing setting for debriefing, discussion, and development of critical thinking skills. It should reinforce and expand the learning that has occurred in the clinical environment. The clinical instructor should be careful to promote a learning atmosphere that respects human values, rights, and choice of spiritual and cultural beliefs. Educators should be approachable, receptive, and supportive. Instructors need to be excellent communicators and clear about expected clinical outcomes. Effectively leading post-conference discussions is very important. Otherwise, valuable learning time may be wasted on “chit chat” and other meaningless activities. Therefore, educator guidance is essential. Students should be given the opportunity to share new experiential knowledge that they gained during their clinical day. To elicit student participation, the instructor might start the post-conference session by asking each student to “share briefly about your patient care experiences today.” Instructors should ask participants to talk about their feelings and attitudes concerning their clinical day in order to access affective learning, especially if the day has been very challenging emotionally. Affective experiences with strong emotional reactions take precedence, because no learning will take place until the feelings have been ventilated or resolved. Questions should be used in conjunction with specific theory being taught in class that week. For instance, if the cardiovascular system was taught, then the instructor might ask questions concerning assigned patients’ blood pressure, heart failure, cardiovascular medications, and other related issues. High-level questions force learners to deal with complexity and promote thinking at more challenging cognitive levels. For instance, a student might be asked, “Which of your patient care problems took priority today?” Group discussions, or interactive dialogue, are another useful learning strategy for post-conference. Participants might be asked to explore such relevant items as, “One of your patient’s medical diagnoses is congestive heart failure. He has crackles in his lungs. How does left-sided congestive heart failure produce pulmonary edema?” Clinical case studies can be assigned to students during the clinical rotation, one case study per clinical day. Presentations should be limited to no more than 20 minutes during the post-conference period. Items the student might discuss include the prioritized plan of care, pertinent assessment data, nursing diagnoses, interventions, and expected outcomes. Another useful learning tool is the clinical concept map. Learners might be expected to draw a concept map at the beginning of the clinical day. Changes to the concept map are expected to occur throughout the patient care period. The final product can be discussed during post-conference. Short easy-to-read nursing articles can also be assigned to students, one article presentation per post-conference period. Free articles are located at the NursingCenter site. One nursing journal that I especially like to use is Nursing Made Incredibly Easy. The Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) also furnishes free clinically-relevant materials, such as The Error-Prone Abbreviation List and the Do Not Crush List. With a little bit of planning, post-conferences can be productive, fun learning experiences for everyone involved. I hope these suggestions are helpful to you in your teaching practice. References Baugh, N. G., & Melliott, K. G. (1998). Clinical concept mapping as preparation for student nurses’ clinical experiences. Journal of Nursing Education, 37(6), 253-256. Hsu, L. L. (2007). Conducting clinical post-conferences in clinical teaching: A qualitative study. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 16(8), 1525-1533.
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Re: The Clinical Post Conference – A Few Guidelines
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