The transition from clinical practice to graduate studies can be daunting to some practicing nurses. It is well documented that graduate nursing students lack academic preparation for rigorous scholarly work. Drs. Kimberly Douglas and Edmund Pajarillo describe a national onboarding consortium of graduate nursing faculty that uses a model onboarding program to address graduate students’ academic preparedness. The program is easily adopted to support students from various backgrounds and regions within the United States. The onboarding program was evaluated initially in a pilot study, which became the foundation for the national program to be customizable. You can learn more about the program and national consortium in their article.

Did you know that 17% of individuals in the US live with substance use disorder (SUD)? Nursing curricula may not adequately address SUD, and stigma can impact patients’ care. Their project measured stigma toward people with SUD among prelicensure nursing students. Students with personal experience had lower stigma scores than those without this experience. In this podcast, Drs. Jennifer Crook and Sarah Febres-Cordero explain the importance of preparing students to care for patients with SUD and how to do this in the curriculum. Learn more about this project and strategies you can use in your own programs.

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This podcast with Drs. Leslie Lopez and Melissa Nunn presents a learner-led clinical simulation to improve communication-specific developmental screening skills of nurse practitioner students. The simulation prepares students to care diverse patients with an emphasis on the pediatric population.

Transitioning current curriculum to the 2021 AACN Essentials, or redesigning curriculum to align with the competency-based Essentials, can be challenging. A group of nurse educators created a crosswalk between the QSEN graduate competency statements and the Essentials to support this transition. Learn more in this podcast and their article about how you can access their crosswalk tool that shows an increase in complexity of expectations for contemporary nursing practice.

Teaching nursing students how to conduct a human-centered design project fosters their creative self-efficacy and cultivates design thinking.  In this podcast, Dr. Jeana Holt describes how she implemented experiential learning based on a human-centered design approach to solving patient care problems. More details about her project and future directions for work in human-centered design are explained in her article.

A tabletop simulation, called Triage Tabletop, was developed by Dr. Laura Liggett and Brandi Snow to offer acute care nurse practitioner (NP) students an opportunity to experience clinical decision-making when triaging patients in the hospital setting. They join us in this podcast to explain this teaching strategy. During an on-campus clinical immersion, students were divided into groups of 4 to 5 each to act as rounding hospitalist NPs with a census of 8 patients. The students worked together to determine the order in which they would visit their patients based on acuity while keeping other responsibilities in mind, such as attending scheduled interdisciplinary rounds. The students also received unexpected pages about changes in patients’ conditions. Interested in developing this triage tabletop simulation? Read more about this sim in their teaching tip.

Drs. Cori Heier and Ashley McMath share their active learning strategy to prepare students for applying for their first job. The strategy has 3 components: resume building by analyzing 5 de-identified RN resumes, critiquing them in small groups, and creating their own resumes; analysis of 4 pictures of people dressed in various attires for their nursing job interview; and a interview “speed dating” session. Learn more in their article.

Nurses play a critical role in reducing health inequities in people experiencing homelessness (PEH), a key social determinant of health. The authors developed and validated competencies; associated knowledge, skills, and attitudes; and concepts, content, and learning activities to serve as an educational framework in providing care for PEH. Learn more about these competencies in this podcast with Rachel Richmond, Joanne Noone, Heather Voss, Aina Hale, and Marilyn Gran-Moravec. Be sure to read their article and visit their website with learning activities and resources you can use in your courses.

Interprofessional team training (IPTT) prepares students from health care professions for team-based care. In this podcast with Dr. Allison Shorten, you will learn why IPTT is important. In their study with 866 students from 11 professions, they compared in-person and online delivery of IPTT: both groups improved, but the in-person delivery resulted in the greatest improvement. However, as Dr. Shorten explains, advantages from in-person delivery should be weighed against online logistical advantages. You can find more detail about the study in their article. 

With the explosion of artificial intelligence (AI), nurse educators are harnessing its impact in education. The most recent trend of AI usage has been with lecture slides. In this podcast, Dr. DeAnna Gapp explains how she uses AI to facilitate her work as a faculty member and presents strategies for using AI in preparing lectures. More examples are provided in Dr. Gapp’s teaching tip.