The Center for Biomedical Informatics
State University of Campinas, Brazil
Research Abstracts
COMPUTERIZED CLINICAL SIMULATIONS IN NURSING. I. THE
EMERGENCY ROOM
Beseggio, R.E. and Renato M.E. Sabbatini
Chair of Medical Informatics, Faculty of Medical Sciences, and
Center for Biomedical Informatics, State University of Campinas, Brazil.
We report here the experimental development of a set of
interactive computer simulations of patient management cases in
nursing, with the help of a generic authoring program for IBM-PC
compatible microcomputers, named MEDTEST I, developed by one of the
authors (RMES). It is ideally suited for the building and presentation
of all kinds of interative case simulations, that are written into a
"script" file, using any ASCII oriented text processing program.
MEDTEST I processes the text and manages the presentation to the
student according to the command lines defined into the script file.
The command language is very simple with only 30 easy-to-use commands.
The program allows several types of questions: single multiple choice,
repeated multiple choice, logical answers (Y/N) and open scalar or
string responses. Textual or graphical information is presented in
frames. Conditional jumps to other questions or frames are possible to
each user response. It allows also the display of scoring, feedback and
critique texts, etc. The purpose of these cases is to improve the
training of practical nurses vis-a-vis realistic situations of clinical
problem solving in the emergency room, including patient data
collection, nursing diagnosis, planning and execution of patient
management and care, etc. The simulated cases try to emphasize those
aspects which are pertinent to the sphere of action of registered
nurses, and include the appearance of unexpected situations, which may
evolve, depending on the students' responses, to other favorable or
unfavorable patient health status. The structure of a simulation allows
for case presentation frames, case summaries, multiple choice and
numeric questions, etc., as well as immediate or delayed student
reinforcement and case review. Comments to each right or wrong question
introduce the student to theoretical and practical discussions on the
medical and physiopathological background of the case. A cummulated
scoring is performed, which is divided into relevant case handling
sections (i.e., data collection, diagnosis, management, etc.) We are
currently evaluating the validity and impact of such methodology on nursing education in our milieu.
Presented at:
I Meeting on Informatics in Nursing, São Paulo, 1993.
Last Updated: March 2, 1996
renato@sabbatini.com
