INTRODUCTION

Nursing students must learn the 2021 American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) domains of person-centered care and interprofessional partnerships to provide holistic, high-quality, and collaborative healthcare. The person-centered care domain emphasizes understanding and respecting each patient’s unique preferences, values, and needs, enabling nurses to deliver individualized care that enhances patient satisfaction and outcomes. The interprofessional partnerships domain equips students to work effectively within diverse healthcare teams, fostering communication, mutual respect, and shared decision-making to ensure comprehensive, coordinated care.

Mastery of these domains prepares students to tackle complex healthcare challenges, promoting patient-centered solutions and fostering a culture of collaboration and safety in clinical practice (AACN, 2021). However, implementing significant patient collaboration may be challenging. In this assignment, the students were to demonstrate both fully including the patient in the development of a goal and showing ways in which the goal may need to be modified based on patient input.

IMPLEMENTATION 

Senior nursing students enrolled in an ambulatory care course at Emory University’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing completed a two-part assignment over the course of the fall semester of 2024 to demonstrate their mastery of the AACN (2021) person-centered care and interprofessional partnerships domains. The assignment’s objectives were: 1) to explore evidence-based interventions for patient and family-centered decision making among diverse populations, and 2) to synthesize approaches to care coordination and transitions across multiple settings.

To prepare students for success, the course instructors 1) lectured on person-centered care, motivational interviewing, and interprofessional partnerships; 2) engaged in discussions on these topics; and 3) hosted guest speakers who were subject matter experts in these areas. Slide decks used in the lectures are available upon request from the corresponding author.

For the assignment, students formed groups of four through self-selection. Once all students had chosen their groups, each group picked a patient from a list of eighteen case study scenarios (Appendix A). All case study scenarios were fictional and purposely created for educational use, not reflecting or containing any actual patient data.

Patient selection for case studies was operated on a first-come, first-served basis. Once a group chose a patient, no other group could select that patient to ensure that student presentations included a variety of patient circumstances, care plans, and interprofessional team members.

During part one of the assignment, each student group authored a paper detailing a care plan for their chosen patient. This portion of the assignment allowed students to demonstrate the interpretation and application tier of Miller’s pyramid of clinical competence (Miller, 1990). Students were instructed that the care plan had to include an interprofessional and patient-centered team approach, be based on verified best practices, reflect care coordination, and show how it was tailored to the patient. See Appendix B for the rubric used to score the papers.

During part two of the assignment, each student group performed a 10-minute in-class roleplay of an interprofessional team meeting in which they developed a SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goal to address one issue from their patient’s care plan. This portion of the assignment allowed students to exhibit the demonstration tier of Miller’s pyramid of clinical competence (Miller, 1990).

Students were instructed that the members of the roleplay team had to include the patient, the RN care coordinator, and two healthcare professionals who best matched their patient’s scenario (e.g., social worker, pharmacist, physician, nutritionist, counselor). See Appendix C for the interprofessional team meeting scoring rubric.

At the start of each group’s role-play, course instructors provided a ‘wild card’ (an unexpected element) to the student portraying the patient. The wild cards reflected the dynamic nature of real-world situations and evaluated students’ readiness to respond to uncertainty in professional practice. See Appendix D for a list of wild cards.

After completing part two of the assignment, students were provided with a questionnaire that included three demographic items and five items related to self-confidence on a Likert scale. Participation in the questionnaire was voluntary and anonymous. Students were assured that their assignment grades would not be affected if they chose not to complete the questionnaire or opted out of having their results included in this analysis. The Emory Non-Human Subjects Research Determination form found that the questionnaire was exempt from IRB review.

RESULTS

Sixty-eight students (17 groups of 4) completed the assignment. Student groups were graded according to the rubrics in Appendix B and Appendix C. The average score on both the care plan paper and the role play exercise was 97%. Instructors noted that students excelled in selecting suitable interprofessional team members to address their patients’ issues, identifying appropriate interventions for their patients’ concerns, and recognizing social determinants of health that might affect the patients’ ability to achieve the SMART goal. Instructors also observed that students tended to read from a script during their role-play and stated the SMART goal at the outset, rather than allowing it to evolve through the patient’s input.

Forty-six students (67.6%) filled out the demographic and self-confidence questionnaire. Forty-four (95.6%) consented to have their results included in this analysis. The demographics of respondents showed that 88.6% were cis- or trans-women, 11.4% were cis- or trans-men, and that their average age was 26.8 years. The race/ethnicity breakdown of the participants are shown in Table 1.