Abstract:

Undergraduate nurse education in Ireland is delivered by third level colleges in partnership with Associated Health Care Providers (AHCPs) and is approved by the Irish nursing board (Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland, NMBI 2016). Preceptors are responsible for teaching and assessing undergraduate students’ clinical competencies in practice. The preceptor role is viewed as part of the staff nurse role in all teaching hospitals and health care settings (NMBI 2019). Staff nurses are required to complete a mandatory teaching and assessment course commonly known as a preceptorship training programme to enable them to take on their teaching role. Numerous face to face preceptor preparation programmes were delivered by universities and AHCP centres of nurse education across Ireland. These varied in length and content and separate courses were provided for each nursing discipline.

Preceptorship programmes are accredited by NMBI and clinical sites are audited on a 4 yearly basis to ensure educational standards are meet and there are adequately prepared preceptors to teach students. Inadequate educational preparation of preceptors is often cited as the reason for poor student learning experiences ( McSharry & Lathlean 2017). Educational audits have reported that difficulty in releasing staff and the resources to run these courses on separate sites as reasons for an insufficient number of prepared preceptors.

Covid 19 brought the addition challenges to delivering preceptorship programmes. Staff were unable to attend group settings due to risk of infection. Furthermore, stories of student nurses being inadequately supervised were exposed in the national media and were a source of government and Department of Health concern. Hence the opportunity arose to develop a common standardised national preceptorship programme that could be accessed online by every staff nurse in Ireland.

This paper sets out the creative and collaborative process in designing a 2-hour eLearning programme involving stakeholders from the health services, the third level colleges and the Nursing board. The course was underpinned by cognitive apprenticeship educational theory(Mc Sharry & Lathlean 2017) and delivery time reduced from one or two day delivery to 2 hours online, how this was achieved will be examined. The benefits of providing this national eLearning programme are identified. The process of identifying essential content and identifying the appropriate digitally delivery methods will be outlined. The challenges of ensuring the eLearning modules met NMBI standards ( NMBI 2019),were relevant to every day practice; realistic; accurate; culturally appropriate, interesting and user friendly will be discussed. How the project team worked with the Aurion Learning design team will be outlined. Finally the authors will share a project template from the evaluation of this project. This could be a useful tool for other professionals in designing similar digital mandatory training programmes.

References:
[1] NMBI (2016). Nurse Registration Programmes Standards and Requirements (4th Ed.). Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland, Dublin
[2] NMBI (2019). Guidelines for Completing the National Competence Assessment Document (1st Ed.). Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland, Dublin.
[3] McSharry,E. Lathlean,J. (2017) Clinical Teaching and Learning within a Preceptorship model in an Acute Care Hospital in Ireland; a qualitative study: Nurse Education Today,51: 73-80 DOI:10.1016/j.nedt.2017.01.00

Keywords:

Nurse education, clinical education, preceptor, mentor, cognitive apprenticeship, e-learning, preceptorship educational programme, teaching and assessing.