Promoting excellence in clinical learning environments: Technical support in the nursing laboratory

Abstract

The university nursing laboratory provides a safe and controlled on-campus environment for nursing practice. Technical staff employed in nursing laboratories use specialist skills and expertise to resource class room clinical scenarios, and a talent to invent, devise and imagine to overcome the challenge of rendering simulations as authentically as possible, to provide optimum delivery of teaching and learning activities. Although the nursing laboratory aims to provide a predictable environment, creative resourcing strategies need to be employed to overcome its limitations of artificiality. Curricula, students' skill levels, physical design of laboratories, their intended purpose, and resource constraints must all be considered for technical staff to support teaching requirements.