How to promote student nurses’ psychological safety in the emergency care curriculum?

Context: Since 2006, all students in healthcare, including student nurses, follow an emergency care curriculum. This curriculum uses simulation, which can be psychologically harmful to students.
Objective: this study explores tutors’ strategies to establish and maintain students’ psychological safety during the emergency care simulations.
Method: A qualitative study was conducted within an exploratory framework. Qualitative data were collected by semi-structured interviews. The sample subjects were emergency care tutors.
Results: The tutors identified risk factors affecting the students’ psychological wellbeing during simulations. Having assessed these risks, tutors deploy prevention strategies. When a student is in psychological distress, they implement several remedial tools. These strategies intervene at the three stages of the simulation: the briefing, the scenario, and the debriefing.
Discussion: The importance of psychological risks for students must be taken into consideration by the tutors in simulation. Those risks must be anticipated from the design to the execution of simulation sessions.
Conclusion: The management of students in psychological distress should be better addressed in the tutors’ own training.