Improving Chinese nursing students' communication skills by utilizing video-stimulated recall and role-play case scenarios to introduce them to the SBAR technique

Purpose: Effective communication among healthcare workers is critically important for patient safety and quality care. The purpose of this pilot study was to evaluate outcomes of a workshop designed to teach Chinese nursing students to use the Situation-Background-Assessment-Recommendation (SBAR) communication tool and examine their attitudes toward utilizing SBAR as a communication tool. Method: A convenience sample of 18 master's degree nursing students at a Chinese university was introduced to SBAR through a workshop. The workshop combined the SBAR tool, video-stimulated recall and role-play case scenarios to illustrate potential positive and negative communication-related patient outcomes. Students completed a 12-item questionnaire before and after participating in the workshop. Four of the items examined the four elements of the SBAR tool (situation, background, assessment, recommendation, score range 0-20), and eight of the items evaluated students' self-perceived attitudes towards utilizing the SBAR tool in their clinical practice (score range 0-40). Results: Pre- and post-workshop scores on the four elements of the SBAR tool demonstrate significant improvement in knowledge of SBAR (14.0 +/- 2.9 vs. 16.6 +/- 2.2, respectively; p = 0.009). Pre- and post-workshop scores on the items testing students' self-perceived abilities also demonstrate significant improvement (26.9 +/- 3.5 vs. 32.6 +/- 4.5, respectively; p <0.01) in using SBAR. Total scores increased significantly from 40.9 +/- 5.0 to 49.2 +/- 5.9 (p <0.01). Moreover, 93.8% of the students agreed and strongly agreed that they would use SBAR during clinical practice. Conclusion: Participating in the SBAR workshop in combination with video-stimulated recall and role-play case scenarios significantly improved the Chinese nursing students' knowledge of SBAR and their self-perceived attitudes towards using SBAR tool. Future studies using a larger sample size and longer post-workshop follow-up are needed to confirm the long-term benefits of the workshop. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.