Teaching to the test: are my CNA students ready to deliver real-world care?
Author: Maureen Bonatch MSN, RN
Passing the CNA state certification test is essential. Otherwise, your students won’t be able to work as CNAs. Plus, student pass rates are essential for your program. But if all your focus is on teaching your students how to pass the test, will they know how to respond to challenges when working in the real world?
You won’t always be there with your students while they’re providing care. This post explores the challenges of preparing HHA and CNA students to transition classroom skills to real-world care. It also presents a promising solution: the use of computer-based, interactive scenarios that mimic real-life caregiving situations, known as CNA virtual simulations.
The Reality of Reality
The lab and clinical components of your HHA or CNA program offer valuable opportunities for your students to practice their skills. Yet, certain skills may be challenging to replicate in the lab without an actual patient. While you can use fellow students as volunteers, they often follow a script that doesn’t mirror the unpredictable nature of real-life scenarios.
You might say that’s where clinical comes in, right? During clinical rotations, your students can practice skills with actual patients and situations to get that much-needed hands-on practice. It’s also a time to develop soft skills like critical thinking and communication.
However, not all your students may have the opportunity to practice all the testable skills during clinicals. Initiatives like Caring4Cal share this concern and support programs like CNA Simulations that help prepare students for the reality of caregiving.
Free training, personal coaching, and incentives of up to $2,750 are provided as a part of the Caring4Cal Health Workforce Development Grant from the California Department of Health Care Access and Information.
Expectations vs reality
Ideally, each of your students will have the chance to practice all the tested CNA skills with a resident. Unfortunately, reality doesn’t always meet expectations.
A resident might not be available for the skill, or CNA programs may be challenged with securing enough clinical sites to train students. Even if things work out and your CNA student has the chance to provide resident care for a testable skill, reality doesn’t always follow the exact steps taught in a classroom. A variety of issues could occur in clinical or while providing real-world care, such as:
Residents who refuse care
Residents that don’t cooperate
Shortages of available supplies or equipment
Having no residents, or limited ones, to practice a testable skill
Limited time for resident care
No instructor is readily available
You won’t always be looking over their shoulder, and you know that most resident care situations aren’t ideal. That’s where critical thinking skills come in. You can help nurture those skills in your students by integrating virtual CNA Simulations into your curriculum.
Prepare Students for Both
Students must know the repeatable steps and facts to pass the CNA state test and to provide quality care. Equally important, they must develop the ability to make decisions, address problems, and respond appropriately when an instructor isn’t there to guide them.
Critical thinking can help students apply what they learn in the classroom to real-life situations. You can further incorporate critical thinking skills practice into your curriculum with virtual simulations. CNA Simulations can help reinforce the right action while helping your students learn from the consequences of choosing the wrong one.
CNAs have to use critical thinking skills to make many challenging decisions. Otherwise, there is more than the risk of failing the CNA state test—there is also the risk of making a mistake that could harm a resident. There’s no do-over when providing care to an actual resdient.
Welcome to the Do-Over
Virtual simulations can allow your students to practice skills repeatedly while facing challenging situations with realistic CNA scenarios. Interactive tools offered by CNA Simulations can provide virtual “hands-on” learning.
Offering your students the chance to apply skills in these simulated environments may change how you prepare them for providing real-world care. This win-win situation allows your students to practice the clinical skills necessary to pass the CNA state test within realistic scenarios that challenge them to apply critical thinking skills. For example, your student may encounter an unexpected pressure injury, an older adult experiencing respiratory distress, or a client pressuring them to act outside their scope of practice. In each situation, they must decide how to respond and when to call the nurse for help.
Here are some of the resources CNA Simulations provides:
Lifelike virtual situations enable your students to face a problem, make a decision, and get immediate feedback—a safe way to learn for students and residents.
The ability to reflect and improve upon decisions by chance to repeatedly practice simulated skills, resulting in increased self-confidence and student satisfaction—most real residents aren’t too receptive to permitting a student to repeat a skill for practice.
CNA characters with unique and complex personalities to practice caring for older adult avatars during simulated CNA clinicals—and the chance to make real-time decisions about what to do and what to say.
Bridge The Reality Gap
CNA Simulations offers innovative tools such as virtual clinical simulations, which include interactive choices with real-time feedback from the nurse instructor character on skills such as counting respirations. Other tools include simulated debriefings that encourage student reflection and reinforce learning and the simulated Electronic Health Record (sEHR) to practice documenting resident or client care.
“The students have expressed how it has been helping to bridge the gaps between Theory and clinical practice.”
These CNA simulations are designed to bridge the gap between classroom theory and delivering real-world care by offering students immersive, realistic, and fun CNA clinical skills learning experiences in risk-free virtual environments. Additionally, initiatives like California’s Caring4Cal program support these innovative teaching methods and promote student interest in careers in home and community-based settings (HCBS).
The result? 95% of students who completed simulations report increased confidence and readiness for real-world care. Anecdotally, both instructors and students report that our CNA simulations help to boost their students’ pass rates on the clinical skills exam for state certification as a CNA. That’s an A+ for you and your CNA students.
Dive into immersive learning experiences with CNA Simulations and empower your students to excel in real-world caregiving!