Education and simulation training of pediatric intensive care unit nurses to care for open heart surgery patients.

Providing appropriate education for nurses working in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) to develop and update the skill sets and knowledge required to care for infants and children with congenital heart disease (CHD) is a challenge. We provide care to children with a variety of congenital heart defects that require medical care and surgical corrections. In the extreme circumstance, we provide extracorporeal membrane oxygenation to those children who require extracardiac support postoperatively. Our program deals with a mean of about 150 cases annually that require surgical correction, in addition to the medically managed patients with CHD. The hospital-based simulation center opened in 2010. It provides high-fidelity simulation to enhance current medical and nursing education. Patient scenarios are created on the basis of real patient cases, maintaining the realistic details of the disease and injury processes essential to provide the pertinent learning points of each case. Shortly after the simulation center opened, the PICU educator inquired about the process to provide PICU nurses an opportunity to learn about pediatric open heart surgery patients at the simulation center. The inherent challenge within our PICU is that we have 32 nurses with various skills sets and experiences who must be able to provide care for all patients within our unit, including children with CHD. At that time, 7 PICU nurses were ready to learn how to provide nursing care to children who have undergone open heart surgery. This state of readiness is detailed later. A classroom format was used to present the material, which addressed identification of defects, along with medical and nursing management. This classroom training was followed by a 4-hour simulation session, wherein these nurses participated in 2 patient scenarios. Clinical objectives (Table 1) were reviewed and reinforced to define what needed to be learned and to ensure that learning occurred. Following this simulation training, each nurse was assigned to admit a pediatric open heart patient with an experienced nurse present to reinforce the prior learning.