Published Works

One of the goals: teaching nurses to work at their highest scope of practice for care coordination. For Valerie Wright, DNP, RN, CNE, blending learning is the vehicle for attaining that level of excellence. Dr. Wright is the Simulation and Interprofessional Coordinator and an Instructional Assistant Professor at the Illinois State University Mennonite College of Nursing (MCN). She also happens to be an MCN alumni, so her career, which includes 14 years working in neonatal intensive care and serving as an Associate Dean, has come full circle.

One of the subjects Dr. Wright teaches is Senior Leadership, a capstone course within the BSN program. The educational mix she presents includes classroom lectures and sim lab practice, using standardized participants (people trained to role-play as patients from underserved populations), clinical rotations, and Sentinel U’s Patient Management and Delegation®.

Doing = Learning

“I focus on many of the “Management of Care” concepts that students will be tested on for the NCLEX: for example, delegation, patient management, informed consent and ethics,” Dr. Wright says. “Prior to using Patient Management and Delegation, I struggled to have case studies that actually applied the content discussed in the classroom.”

In addition to engaging learners and helping improve clinical judgement skills, Dr. Wright thinks that the Patient Management and Delegation clinical scenario is an exceptional way to bring a lecture to life. “I’m pretty creative with the methods of teaching that I use, but I’ve never been able to find anything as good as Patient Management and Delegation.”

Providing Meaningful Experiences

While MCN has access to clinics and hospitals, those environments don’t always offer the leadership practice students need outside the classroom or sim lab. “It’s one thing for me to be leading classes on delegation, but unless students actually do those things, they are not going to learn it. And they never get to delegate in the hospital because assignments are already made, and the nurse tells them what the delegations are when students start their day on the floor.”

Advantages for Both Students and Faculty

All of Sentinel U’s software includes specific resources for faculty and students. Dr. Wright has been able to eliminate a textbook, saving students money, while still providing access to essential learning materials, 24/7/365. She also has been able to streamline her workload. “We get students set up, run through the first scenario in class, and they take it from there. After that, there’s not a lot of management on my end.” In addition, the Sentinel U® customer service team developed a custom reporting system that pulls the activity data on all 154 of her students into a single document.