Learning transfer of communication skills from simulation to clinical practice in nursing students

Abstract

Introduction: Procedural training with Clinical Simulation (CS) has been shown to have a high level of transfer to practice according to the perception of students, however, there is little research on communication skills trained with this methodology, which motivates this study, seeking to establish whether there is transfer of the use of SBAR learned in the controlled environment of CS to clinical practice. General objective: Evaluate the transfer of learning to use the SBAR technique in clinical practice after having been trained with CS in nursing students. Materials and methods: Quantitative, cross-sectional, quasi-experimental correlational study between October 2022 and January 2023 in nursing students from second to fourth year of the 13 campuses of the Universidad Santo Tomás, Chile, who underwent post-training clinical practices on the use of SBAR with CS. The sample was randomly stratified with proportional affixation of 332 students from a universe of 2,370. Data were analyzed in IBM SPSS Statistics using frequencies, measures of central tendency and Spearman correlation. Results and discussion: There is transfer of learning using the SBAR technique from simulation to clinical practice and correlation between year studied and percentage of achievement, which could be explained by the number of simulations performed by students. Conclusion: After a training program in communication skills using the SBAR technique, it is possible to achieve high levels of performance in students, evidenced by the ability to transfer these learnings in CS to clinical practice, which is generated progressively as they advance in the formative levels.