Can Nursing Students Benefit from Using Artificial Intelligence?

A series of surprising developments including the release of generative chatbots like ChatGPT has rapidly increased awareness of the growing capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI), sending shock waves through the research, academic, and nursing education community. As a nurse educator, I initially became interested in the power of AI (in all its forms) to speed the research process and improve investigator workflows. Over time, it became evident that nursing students might benefit from AI in their study methods and when acquiring nursing knowledge to support their academic success.

Photo by John Schnobrich/Unsplash

To better understand this, it is helpful to consider the three fundamental stages in which nursing students acquire knowledge and explore how AI can play a pivotal role in each stage. This blog post will include an overview of AI-powered tools with example prompts to guide students’ academic efforts.

Preparation–Cognitive Stage

In this stage, nursing students are mastering knowledge foundational to nursing practice, including remembering and retaining facts and essential concepts. Students find themselves in this stage when they are learning new content. Open-access large language models (LLMs) in the form of chatbots can support students in this stage by providing concise summaries of pathophysiology, pharmacology, and disease management. AI can also […]

2024-01-25T10:18:12-05:00November 15th, 2023|artificial intelligence (AI), Nursing, Technology|1 Comment
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The Many Masks Nursing Students Wear

In my experience, nursing students often have an intense drive, intelligence, curiosity, and resilience to get them through the two years of the specialty courses in our BSN program. But sometimes the strain of the many demands and new experiences can be overwhelming, and over the years I have had numerous students come to my office for reassuring words and a safe space to reveal their struggles.

Amidst the rigors of nursing school (and their nursing careers to come), it’s important that students find a way to balance studying with self-care. We all wear masks in our lives; in fact, they are essential. Here are some of the masks that I’ve noticed students adopt when they feel particularly under pressure.

Always smiling.

When I was a student almost 20 years ago, I was stressed more days than I was happy. While everyone has a different temperament, I know I was not alone in this. As an educator, I’ve noticed that some students seem to be always smiling, as if the smile is frozen on their faces. There are some real advantages to friendly, caring smiles from a nurse, in that they can help build rapport with patients who are in a vulnerable position. But in some cases, by always smiling, the students may be trying to live up […]

2022-12-12T10:08:10-05:00December 12th, 2022|Nursing, nursing students|0 Comments
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In Nursing, Empathy Is a Practice to Cultivate

Empathy as one reason nurses are so widely trusted.

Last December, nurses were named the most honest and trusted profession in the U.S. for the 17th year in a row. In order to build trusting nurse-patient relationships that can help improve health, nurses must understand the needs and circumstances of patients, families, and communities. One way nurses arrive at an understanding of these needs is through practicing empathy. This may explain why nurse empathy has been found to be a major factor in hospitalized patients’ satisfaction with their care.

photo credit: EKGTechnicianSalary

The word empathy is not very old, as words go. It appears to have been a translation into English, using a combination of Greek roots meaning ‘in’ and ‘feeling,’ of an early 20th century German psychological term, Einfűhlung (‘feeling-in’).

In health care, we generally define empathy as the ability to enter a patient’s frame of reference (thoughts, emotions, circumstances, etc.) and sense the meaning in her or his inner world, as the concept was described by Carl Rogers, one of the founders of humanistic psychology. 

Are we becoming less empathetic?

These days, empathy can often seem to be in short supply. Much-publicized study findings suggest that […]

2019-06-13T07:49:55-04:00June 13th, 2019|Nursing|1 Comment
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True Grit: A Core Nursing Attribute?

‘Seeing things through.’

In the popular movie named after the attribute, a young girl searches for a man with “true grit”—someone with courage, fortitude, and determination to see things through. She needed someone to find her father’s murderer and believed only someone with true grit would be able to persevere against the odds.

The concept of grit is a good one to describe attributes that a good nurse should possess. How often do we get through challenging days—with short staff and patient crises, for example—just by sheer grit, by having the willpower to soldier on and do what needs to be done?

Helping nursing students develop grit.

In this month’s issue of AJN, Linda Koharchik reflects on the need for grit in nursing and believes nursing faculty can help students develop it. In her article “Helping Students to be Gritty,” she cites several sources that describe ways for clinical instructors to help students. One way is to assign challenging patients or situations, so students can benefit from the instructor’s guidance in handling particularly difficult circumstances.

I agree. As a nursing student, I gained most of my clinical experience in a large municipal hospital that was often underequipped, with basic supplies sometimes hard to come by. We learned to problem-solve and improvise […]

2019-01-16T15:57:20-05:00January 16th, 2019|Nursing, nursing students, students|2 Comments
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Counting on Colleagues (and Former Students) When a Family Member is Hospitalized

Rarely do we consider what it might be like to see [a former student’s] face across the bed of a desperately ill loved one.   

Illustration by Janet Hamlin. All rights reserved.

That’s from AJN‘s May Reflections essay by nursing professor Amy Kenefick Moore, who shares her family’s experience over the hectic days that follow a terrible accident in which her stepson sustains critical injuries.

When her stepson is admitted to a hospital affiliated with her school of nursing, Moore reaches out on her university LISTSERV to ask the nurses working at that hospital to watch out for her family member. “Responses flew back,” with alumni working on the trauma service promising to take good care of Moore’s stepson.

Nurses as family members.

Whatever our nursing experience, when we’re on the scene as family members, we usually understand the basics of the clinical situation and its possibilities. Our knowledge of nursing and medicine and of our family member’s medical history, functional baseline, and beliefs about health and illness can be a great asset to those caring for our loved one. […]

2018-05-09T13:10:44-04:00May 7th, 2018|Nursing, nursing stories|0 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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