Conference Proceedings - School of Nursing & Midwifery - Trinity ...

School of Nursing & Midwifery, Trinity College Dublin: 8 th Annual Interdisciplinary Research Conference
Transforming Healthcare Through Research, Education & Technology: 7 th – 9 th November 2007
Conference Proceedings
number of students (n=163). Focus group interviews are planned
with patient simulators, facilitators, and practice colleagues to
complete the qualitative data set.
Nominal Group Technique
All 145 students in the cohort were invited to an evaluation day,
which included an overall summary of the project, the perspective
of the Simulated Patient Unit (SPU) and a modified version of a
nominal group technique (NGT). NGT is a method of collecting large
amounts of data in a relatively short period of time, and has been
utilised for educational purposes previously (Macphail, 2001). The
evaluation day commenced in a lecture theatre with the entire
cohort together, and following this smaller rooms were made
available for students to remain in the mixed-discipline groups that
had completed the project to undertake the first part of the NGT.
Facilitators of the NGT met before the event to ensure that a
uniform approach was maintained, and that all materials used were
constant. Eight mixed groups, of approximately 18 students,
worked simultaneously in different rooms on the campus. Each
student was asked to pick a seat of their own choice and to work
independently for the period of the NGT. Students were all given a
pre-printed A4 sheet with the following statement:
“The NMC are considering whether to replace up to 10% of
practice learning with simulated practice.”
The following instructions were additionally printed on these sheets:
� Please write all your responses to this statement below.
� Please do not discuss this statement with your colleagues. We
are interested in your individual response
Once students had written all of their responses to the NMC
statement, they were asked to identify their own top five priorities
and rank them from 1 to 5, with 1 being the most important. Each
student was then given five Post-It notes and asked to write one of
their priorities on each Post-It and to number them according to
their rank priority. Flip chart paper was made available in each
room, separately numbered from 1 to 5. Students were then asked
to post their Post-Its’ onto the corresponding sheet of flip chart
paper.
All responses were then collated according to the ranking that
students had identified. All rank 1 response flip charts were
collected together and typed-up onto a single Word file.
Simultaneously, all other ranked responses were collected together
and quickly typed-up. The resulting five files were amalgamated
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