Can we insulate trainee nurses from exposure to bad practice? A study of role play in communicating bad news to patients

摘要

This paper investigates the effects of three different role models in teaching trainee nurses to cope with the sensitive task of communicating a traumatic event to patients or their relatives This is a long‐standing problem with a high level of dissatisfaction within the field of nurse training This study, in contrast to other studies of telling bad news (TBN), has focused on the person who gave rather than received bad news This study also reinforces the view that role play and role modelling are not only effective learning methods in nurse training but are natural methods of learning in the profession Student nurses are constantly exposed to other people's attempts at caring Eighteen student nurses were randomly selected from a total student intake of 66 students for study in depth Nine main skills were identified in a TBN task Six student nurses were exposed to negative examples of a novice telling bad news, six to an expert model doing it and six to both models The results showed that nurses learned quickly from role models, whether it was the negative instance of a poor model or the positive instance of an expert model or a combination of both No significant difference in effectiveness between the three models was observed The findings are discussed with reference to implications for nursing education in gener