Teaching Clinical Decision-Making Skills to Undergraduate Nursing Students via Web-based Virtual Patients during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A New Approach to The CyberPatient Simulator

An important aspect of nursing education is teaching clinical decision-making skills.

Because of the complexity of the legal and professional issues they face today, nursing students must acquire sufficient skills to make clinical decisions during their education. Furthermore, the ability to diagnose and treat patients quickly and accurately is not a skill that can only be learned theoretically. Currently, after training courses and before students enter the practical stage and deal directly with patients, they teach them how to diagnose disease quickly, make the right decision, take action accordingly, and deal with patients professionally. For this purpose, considering the achievements of technology, it is recommended to do planning so that it can be integrated into the clinical education curriculum. In this regard, technology has been used in nursing education for years to enhance teaching and learning.

Conclusions: The study showed that the decision-making skills of nursing students were significantly improved by virtual patient simulations. The educational intervention and simulator used in this study can be integrated into undergraduate nursing student education curricula to help them acquire clinical decision-making skills.