A teaching intervention to improve the self-efficacy of internationally educated nurses

Increasingly, the U.S. health care system relies on internationally educated nurses to meet the staffing shortage. Many of these nurses come to the United States from Asian countries, especially the Philippines, India, Korea, and increasingly China. Because of conflicting professional and socioeconomic expectations, a growing body of literature has documented a range of challenges experienced by internationally educated nurses during their transition to the U.S. health care environment and American society. This article describes an increase in perceived self-efficacy for a group of internationally educated nurses (N = 18) who participated in an adverse cardiac event with the use of computer-assisted simulation training. The findings indicate that internationally educated nurses may increase their self-efficacy in caring for patients in U.S. health care facilities if they receive some pre-employment simulation training to help them transition to the U.S. health care work force.