| The purpose of this existential-phenomenological study was to address the first-person perspective of what it is like to experience clinical reasoning during a simulation. It was not known how a novice nurse would describe the experience of actualizing clinical reasoning during the academic simulation experience. In order to maintain the first-person perspective, all presuppositions were eliminated. There were no instruments used in the data collection process, and no theories or models that guided this research. The researcher integrated Amedeo Giorgi's method of analysis to discover the psychological acts of the first person (novice nurse) to address the unknown. The research questions for this study focused on the lived experience of the novice nurses actualizing clinical reasoning acquisition during the academic simulation experience, and the aspects of the experience of clinical reasoning acquisition during an academic simulation experience novice nurses described as being valuable. Raw descriptive data were collected from five novice nurses through the face-face interview process in Northeast Pennsylvania. The analysis revealed that clinical simulation was the better teaching environment for complex decision making than the real clinical environment. The simulation environment gave the freedom to engage in complex decision-making during a high stakes clinical situation. This freedom, coupled with inexperience in complex decision-making, created much ambiguities of the complexity of the nursing practice. Implications of the study included potential best practices into the simulation design to decrease ambiguities.;Keywords: Nursing simulation, nursing students, novice nurses, clinical reasoning, phenomenology. |
