Enhancing student nurses' ethical skills via simulation-based learning: barriers and opportunities

Area of Science:

• Nursing Education
• Bioethics
• Healthcare Professional Development

Background:

• Nurses often lack skills in ethical problem analysis, leading to frustration with clinical dilemmas.
• Ethics education in nursing curricula is frequently neglected or inadequately resourced.
• Ineffective ethics facilitation threatens healthcare ethical values and patient outcomes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To explore barriers to facilitating ethical competence in nursing students.
• To identify transformative strategies for enhancing ethics education in nursing.

Main Methods:

• Qualitative, descriptive, exploratory, and contextual research design.
• Conducted online semi-structured interviews with 9 nurse educators and clinical preceptors.
• Data analyzed using Giorgi's thematic analysis method.

Main Results:

• Identified barriers hindering ethics education, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which shifted focus to clinical skills.
• Highlighted transformative approaches, including simulation-based learning, for effective ethics education.
• Two main themes and five subthemes emerged from the analysis.

Conclusions:

• Insufficient resources and infrastructure pose significant barriers to ethics education for nursing students, particularly during crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Higher education institutions can adopt transformative solutions to ensure effective facilitation of ethical competence.
• Simulation-based learning offers a promising strategy to overcome these challenges.