Efficacy of Virtual Clinical Simulation on Nursing Diagnostic Reasoning in Adult Health.
Nursing; Education, Nursing; Nursing diagnosis; Problem-Based Learning; Simulation Training.
Methodological study, with the aim to evaluate the efficacy of virtual clinical simulation, grounded on problem based learning, as an educational strategy for the Nursing diagnosis reasoning in adult health. The study was developed in four stages, namely: construction of the scenarios for virtual clinical simulation on diagnostic reasoning; content analysis of scenarios by specialists; development of the virtual learning object for clinical simulation; and application of virtual clinical simulation with undergraduate students in Nursing. The creation of the simulated scenarios was based on the literature, through diagnostic validation studies. The scenarios were analyzed by 22 experts in diagnostic reasoning and / or clinical simulation. The third stage allowed to allocate the scenarios in the virtual clinical simulation. After the final engineering, the virtual object was submitted to the test of its usability next to a team composed by eight students of Nursing and nurses. In the last step, the virtual clinical simulation strategy was tested by an experimental study with undergraduate students of the Nursing undergraduate course at a public university in Northeast Brazil. The students were randomized into the intervention and control groups. The intervention group was submitted to virtual clinical simulation and evaluated the quality of the virtual learning object. Data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The project was approved by the research ethics committee, with favorable opinion nº 2.171.393. The results show that the simulated clinical scenarios were created by the responsible researcher, who were later judged by the specialists as relevant (CVI equal to or greater than 0.85). All the proposed diagnoses presented a high degree of accuracy, with an acceptable measurement for CVI and Kappa index. As a third step, the virtual learning object was developed. It presented good usability (final score of 87.81). In the experimental stage, the comparison of the intervention and control groups for diagnostic inference showed a significant increase in the number of correct answers for diagnostic inference (p = 0.008) and identification of related factors (p = 0.031) at the post-test stage of the intervention group. The prioritization of the diagnoses showed a statistically significant difference when the pre- and post-test moments (p = 0.08) were compared in the intervention group, as well as when the intervention and control groups were compared (p = 0.014). There was a greater difference in performance between the pre- and post-test in the scores of the students who participated in the intervention (p = 0.003). In addition, the virtual object obtained a high average quality score (4,66). Thus, it is concluded that the virtual clinical simulation grounded on problem-based learning was presented as an effective educational strategy for the nursing diagnosis reasoning in adult health. Moreover, the educational technology developed was attractive and favored the active and meaningful learning of the student.