Promoting Accurate Information Narratives: Using Simulation to Enhance Students' Skills in Addressing Pain...

Patients increasingly encounter pain-related misinformation, requiring health professionals to effectively navigate the effects of misinformation to ensure appropriate patient care. This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of a simulation-based innovation to enhance physiotherapy students' self-efficacy to navigate pain misinformation in clinical settings, an integral concept of safe and effective practice.

The Promoting Accurate Information Narratives (P.A.I.N) innovation was introduced as part of an undergraduate clinical simulation course and aimed to provide physiotherapy students with strategies for navigating pain misinformation during patient care. The innovation consisted of the following three key components: (1) a tutorial on identifying and addressing pain misinformation, (2) a simulated patient case and (3) postsimulation feedback and debriefing.

Students' (N = 68) self-efficacy in identifying, evaluating and addressing pain misinformation was assessed before and after innovation using surveys, while student satisfaction was explored through surveys and focus groups. Post-innovation, self-efficacy significantly improved across all items (p < 0.001). Students had high overall satisfaction with all aspects (median score = 4/5, IQR 1.0) but reported needing repeated practice and additional strategies to address more challenging clinical situations.

The P.A.I.N innovation provided an experiential simulation-based approach to improving physiotherapy students' self-efficacy to identify and address pain misinformation in clinical settings. Future applications should consider expanding the innovation to increase the number and complexity of clinical case scenarios and enabling and supporting students to integrate these skills into clinical practice.