Collaborative strategies to improve clinical judgement and address bedside care challenges

The Next Generation NCLEX (NGN) has led to increased classroom utilization of NGN-style case studies to improve clinical judgment skills; however, these case study topics are often standardized cases developed by NCLEX preparation products or are developed at the discretion of didactic nursing faculty and may not be entirely reflective of the diverse patient populations, acuity, and evolving challenges occurring directly at the bedside. This potential gap between case study content and practice realism led to the development of a col-laborative education innovation between nursing school faculty and a certified wound and ostomy nurse in a prelicensure nursing course. The clinical judgment activity addressed skin and wound care skillsets in stu-dents through the creation of three NGN case studies that reflected current bedside issues experienced by new graduate nurses at the affiliated academic medical center. Following the activity, students demonstrated improvement on clinical judgment questions and increased confidence in skin and wound topic areas. Find-ings indicated that utilizing a brief stepwise process that emphasizes collaboration between faculty and con-tent experts to regularly update NGN case studies can serve a dual benefit of addressing NGN certification success, as well as addressing potential bedside care challenges experienced by new graduate nurses.& COPY; 2023 Organization for Associate Degree Nursing. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.