Professional Experience Placement

This paper recently published reports on the findings of a pilot project to develop a remote guidance system to nursing students in the development of procedural skills.  This pilot trial preceded the recently published article, that was blogged here as Helping Hands: Using augmented reality to provide remote guidance to health professionals on 5 September. This project details the ‘proof of concept’ and highlights the strengths that were carried into the next project as well as the pitfalls that were not.  This project used simple dressings as the procedure.  While the procedure was ‘doable’ in the ‘helping hands’ sense, it took novice students who had not undertaken prior tuition or been on placement a long time to do the dressing which was very time-consuming for everyone. It was anecdotally interesting that students found no issue with using the technology they were so focused on maintaining a sterile field that the method of delivery of instruction seemed unimportant.  The next project also needed to broadened to include other health profession students and the procedure needed to be one that all professionals use, hence hand hygiene became the procedure to be undertaken.

Students in both projects were enthusiastic about the potential of the technology as were the clinicians who also tested the system.  It has the capacity to change the meaning of the Nursing and Midwifery Board standards and guidelines definition of direct and indirect supervision. The guidelines currently include “The supervisor must be physically present at the workplace, observing at all times when the supervisee is providing clinical care, according to the supervised practice plan”.

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