Nursing Education
This section discusses several types of nursing education. The education of student nurses consists of comfort care plans which are used by students to detail all of the comfort interventions they provided their patient(s) for one clinical episode. The care plans follow the nursing process format and, as such, are easy to learn and apply. There is also a case study with completed taxonomic structure for teaching purposes. There are care plans for just a patient, and one for patients and their families if the student has been fortunate enough to work with both. Link to care plans
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Another aspect of student nurse education is addressed by my colleague Miki Goodwin who has published widely on the topic and the accompanying questionnaire for students. Dr. Goodwin’s emphasis is on the ways in which faculty can make students feel more comfortable in their educational program, instead of feeling threatened. She and I both argue that nursing faculty MUST be strong role models for how to be comforting to students, their patients, and those family members with whom the student interacts. So there is a nice guided imagery script to help students feel more comfortable and a student nurse comfort questionnaire to measure the effects of this intervention. I also posted a very funny video on Facebook about the need for comforting student nurses.
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Another aspect of nurse education is how to become a Comfort Care Institution. This framework is helpful when a hospital system wants to apply for Magnet Status. If done thoroughly, the process includes in-services for how to apply the different aspects of Comfort Theory (CT) to all aspects of the work environment, including nurse comfort.
Even when an entire institution does not use CT for its practice model, nurses still need to feel comfortable discussing important subjects with their patients, such as end of life preferences or perinatal loss. This is another area of application and requires an modification to the Nurse Comfort Questionnaire. Here is a link to a powerpoint for how to modify a comfort instrument for your specific population or research question.
