“Mental health is an area where there’s still quite a lot of stigma, negative attitudes and misinformation,” says Lecturer in mental health nursing Fiona Orr.
Addressing this stigma and equipping nursing students with the skills to work effectively with people with mental illness has been a key focus of Orr’s work. Her ongoing success was recently recognised with a UTS Learning and Teaching Award.
Orr was part of the team that developed the ‘Hearing Voices that are Distressing’ simulation workshop. Designed to give students an understanding of what it might be like for people who hear voices due to mental illness, the simulation is now embedded in a third-year subject for all undergraduate nursing students.
“Simulated voices were recorded on MP3 players and the students listen to those while carrying out everyday tasks. It helps give them insight, awareness and – most of all – empathy,” says Orr.
When the project was introduced in 2008, it was the first training of its kind for undergraduate nursing students in an Australian university.
Students report it has a dramatic impact on the way they understand voice hearing, and enables them to develop strategies to work with people who hear voices due to mental illness.
The Faculty of Health has developed a range of similarly innovative and creative learning initiatives over the past year, supported by Learning2014 grants from the Vice-Chancellor’s Learning and Teaching fund.
‘Flipped onto their Feet’ is a suite of new online audio-visual resource that uses online patient vignettes to engage students with more realistic nursing scenarios in their Medical Surgical subject. Students are required to watch the videos before coming into the lab, where they carry out practical tasks on simulation manikins that represent the patient depicted in the vignette.
Known as ‘flipped learning’, this approach means students are able to fully utilise their time in the lab and better able to relate to the patient’s situation.
“We got amateur actors in to play patients and filmed them,” says project coordinator Lecturer Tamara Power.
“We were able to introduce different cultures, different socio-economic circumstances, different behaviours. It was really good for students to see that in a non-confronting forum.”
Bachelor of Nursing student Mariann Singh agrees. “I love that Tamara not only gives case study patients the usual backstory, but gets in age- and look-appropriate actors to film the scenarios, then dresses the manikins in the same clothing as in the video, even down to the detail of one patient who had a tattoo sleeve.”
Other initiatives the faculty developed from its Learning2014 grants were a pilot audio-visual online resource to improve students' therapeutic interviewing skills, and multimedia tools to facilitate students' ability to understand and provide clinical handover.
According to aged care Lecturer Joanne Lewis, “The online modules have successfully engaged students in topics they previously found boring.”
The modules have also helped dispel students’ negative preconceptions about aged care nursing and palliative care.
“We’re exposing students to some really positive perspectives on ageing that they wouldn’t have otherwise seen in the broader media,” says Lewis.
The projects represent a taste of things to come at UTS, as teaching continues to evolve, capitalising on the new learning spaces and technologies made available by the City Campus Master Plan.
- The Faculty of Health has developed a range of innovative and creative learning initiatives over the past year, supported by Learning2014 grants from the Vice-Chancellor’s Learning and Teaching fund
- The projects have had a dramatic effect on the way students relate to patients with mental illness, and understand aged and palliative care