Practical Skill and Techniques of Peripheral Intravenous Cannulation - Essay Example

? Teaching plan for practical skill and techniques of peripheral intravenous cannulation Teaching plan for practical skill and techniques of peripheral intravenous cannulation Peripheral intravenous cannulation is the ability to obtain peripheral intravenous access to the body It is a very important clinical skill for most clinical medical professionals. It is considered one of the simple procedures, however mastering this procedure requires a great deal of refining of skills and experience. Cannulating a vein for instance a small one can also be a challenging task and thus the importance of proper teaching method for the skills and techniques. This teaching plan shall provide an easy format to help teach medical staff like the nurses, midwives, physicians and surgeons on this procedure. The objectives of this teaching plan are to enable the student to know the devices and equipment used for this particular procedure. While learning, the students should know various parts of the body which are the best insertion sites. The students should also be able to completely do the procedure successfully and be aware of any associated complication and how to handle them. There are several learning theories that have been brought forward, the three main ones are behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism. These theories merely try to explain how we learn. The behaviorist theory focuses mainly on the observable change .To modify people’s attitudes and responses, behaviorists believe that you either change the stimulus conditions in the environment or change what happens after a response happens. Behaviorists generally ignore the internal factors of learning but on the contrary the cognitive learning theorists stress the importance of what goes on within the learner. Cognitive learning allows a student to think critically and gather information to acquire and develop his/her skills. It is therefore important in plan to teach certain skills that a conducive environment is provided to ease understanding of complex procedures. Lastly the constructivism focuses developing one’s learning from personal experiences. This simply applies a teacher must take into consideration the experience of the student thus provide sufficient room for practice either through simulations or with a real patients. Individuals may prefer a particular method of learning or different style and it’s the teacher’s judgment to decide which theory works for his student. The most common method used by many teachers is when students perform the cannulation under the supervision of a competent clinical procedure teaching staff. There are several preferred learning styles by the students may opt one being the practical on an actual patient. In this case the practitioner or teacher must be present and ensure that the student has sound understanding of the procedure and anticipated outcomes. These may be both complications and expected anticipation. The other method could be the use of a simulated environment this can be used especially with students who have high anticipation to lower the pressure of dealing with an actual patient. For such students I would focus on building their psychomotor skills so that they build up confidence and it’s more practical to teach the students in parts. In such an environment the students can discover and learn different methods of performing the skills and also learn to correct errors that they make without fear of harming patients. These students would have enough practice before they can actually perform their first clinical procedure in an actual environment. Another technique that also uses non patients is use of videos from audio visual libraries to give the students a view of “real” patient scenarios. Although it has its disadvantages it also helps especially by filling the gap when real patients are not available. Similarly models may be used in teaching procedures like the intravenous cannullae insertion. This is very useful especially for students who have never performed such procedures to practice their skills. Students learning in practice can be greatly enhanced if the student has a good understanding of the learning theories. This is because this forms the basis for any practical clinical practice. This cognitive skill is important for learning for instance a teacher may require verbally describe a certain procedure before actually performing it if it is relevant. For peripheral intravenous cannulation it may include the patient history, data to support the procedure. If a student has a good understanding of the learning theories he may be in a better position to evaluate him on how to incorporate all the theories to suit his practical learning objectives. He is able to combine the behavioral theory to create desirable change for this case a new skill and techniques in peripheral intravenous cannulation. Students with understanding of the constructivist theory would appreciate the importance of continuous exposure to learning by doing the procedures over and over again until they learn from such experience. In practical learning experiences feedback is one of as the most important factor for both the teacher and learner..With technology like video and computer analysis of clinical procedures the students can almost instantaneously observe and self evaluate them self or reflect on the procedure at a future date when revisiting the skills. Lack of a feedback mechanism may lead to poor development of skills or development of the wrong techniques. As with all practical skills, the student must be given constructive feedback and allowed time for practice of the skills. This mainly has to do with communication skills of the teaching staff and the students. Sometimes it maybe necessary to have an aide to help keep the feedback focused constructive short and specific. Another form is to use a video during teaching and review it after the procedure this can a powerful tool for learning and correction. In summary feedback reduces the discrepancy between the actual and the desired results. With feedback it’s possible for the teacher and the student alike to develop effective error detection skills which lead to their own self – evaluation aimed at improving a certain skill. Apart from teachers and fellow students, patients can also be very important in giving insightful feedback. The teacher may be asked to compare the skills from his previous peripheral intravenous cannulation to that of a student. Timing is also important since this is a simple procedure the teacher should focus of small groups to avoid crowding the patient. This will ensure proper feedback and better learning results. Feedback helps to keep the student in check by asking three important question where am I going, how am going and where to next. With a task or learning the skills and techniques of intravenous cannulation these three questions should be answered constantly through reflective feedback. For feed back to be effective there is need for immediacy since good feedback helps clarify what good performance by setting goals, targets and clear objectives. It facilitated the development of self evaluation and reflection in learning a skill. It also delivers high quality information to both the teachers and students about their learning. It also offers encouragement for teachers and fellow students around learning. Feedback can sometime encourage positive motivation belief and self esteem.. For any teaching plan to be effective the teachers who have qualities such as knowledge and understanding of the concepts and theories that pertains to the patients in the clinical setting. Who can be able to assist students use the applied knowledge and who themselves are constantly improving their knowledge by using up-to-date nursing and healthcare updates. They should also have clinical competence as they cannot teach clinical practices if they themselves cannot practice the same. Finally they should have skill in clinical teaching by having the ability to assess learning needs and plan for them appropriately so that they are met and dealt with accordingly. This includes skill in clinical observation, where the teacher is able to observe and give feedback to students either during or after a certain procedure. He should be able to identify the small steps in each and every complex procedure. He should also have skill in questioning students. This is a very effective guide in guiding learning. Through thought provoking questions the students can be challenged without necessarily feeling like they are being interrogated. When questioning the students the teacher also assesses the understanding of his students and can also get to know their major bottlenecks. The last part of this teaching plan should be evaluation in which the students have to be evaluated on their skills and techniques. This evaluation is would serve both the purpose of formative and summative. Formative in that the teacher will be able to assess a student’s progress and summative that forms the basis in which the teacher can give grades. However learning any clinical setting can be very important and interesting for students by a hard task for teachers sometimes. To be on the proper path it is advisable for the teacher to always have a clear objective at the beginning and focus on the agreed learning tasks, encourage and motivate the students to fully participate and observe keenly the performance and offer constructive feedback when appropriate. All in all as a teacher you need to apply all other important basic organizational and teaching skills like you are expected to be organized, prepare the content, structure the session and apply your basic teaching. Conclusion Practical clinical teaching can be a complex process intended to facilitated learning. For this procedure however the goal was to lead the students to discover how to knowledge and skills of Peripheral Intravenous Cannulation. The article began by clearly identifying the main objectives and expected outcomes which provide a good suggestion for areas for assessment for evaluation purposes. The teacher should firstly plan his/her lessons to cater for the needs of the students, to do this the teacher needs to have sound clinical competence in arriving at sound judgments and good skills of observing clinical performance. The last part involves evaluation and feed back gauge the level of understanding of the students. In overall the teaching plan need to focus on the needs of the student and a myriad of techniques based on the various learning theories used to ensure skills and techniques are well mastered. References Rafael Ortega et al s.2008: Peripheral Intravenous Cannulation. The new England Journal of Medicine [online] available at http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMvcm0706789 Read More