Critical Incident Stress in Healthcare Education: An Integrative Review

Healthcare professionals' repeated exposure to critical incidents can cause various physical and psychological symptoms with potentially severe personal and professional consequences. Healthcare students' exposure to critical incidents begins during their clinical education. Despite known consequences, healthcare education has yet to implement a standardized approach for preparing students for critical incidents. Critical incident stress management, one identified program, has been utilized in healthcare organizations. However, formal critical incident stress management programs may not be appropriate for healthcare education with requirements to educate students on the clinical knowledge, skills, and judgment needed during critical incidents.

The purpose of this review was to determine the state of the science related to critical incident stress in the context of healthcare education.

A literature search was conducted, and peer-reviewed articles were included.

Four articles were identified for inclusion, signaling a need for more research on critical incident stress in healthcare education.

The available literature suggests that students are impacted by critical incident stress. The studies in this review did not incorporate critical incident stress or components of critical incident stress management programs into their overall curricula or educational programs. The studies did demonstrate that students may be positively or negatively influenced by critical incident stress. Critical incident stress programs are not widely incorporated into healthcare education; however, it has been demonstrated that a standardized approach to preparing and supporting students is needed. Future studies need to determine if critical incident stress should be integrated into healthcare education and the outcomes.