2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Work in Progress: Clinical Immersion Model for Biomedical Engineering Undergraduate Students with Experienced Nurses

Key words: Biomedical Engineering, Nursing, Clinical Immersion, Design and Development
Loay Al-Zube, Sara Dorris

Abstract:
The first phase in the product design and development process is need identification. There are many factors that can affect biomedical engineers’ readiness and ability to identify healthcare providers' clinical needs. Some of these factors include age, maturity, and prior experience with healthcare providers. Other factors include healthcare providers' own communication style and the type of information that they are providing.
Clinical experiences among biomedical engineering (BME) students are limited by access and exposure and are rarely addressed in undergraduate biomedical engineering curricula. This paper proposes and assesses a new clinical immersion model for biomedical engineering undergraduate students with nurses. The model facilitates engaging and interactive learning community of researchers, nurses, and BME students. We launched a summer clinical immersion program allowing rising juniors and seniors in Biomedical Engineering to experience, empathize, observe, and communicate with various nurses in clinical setting. The goals were to identify and research unmet clinical needs and challenges, build a database of clinical challenges facing nurses in small healthcare institutions, assess participants technology-driven problem-solving skills, identify BME students career aspirations, and investigate the factors that affect BME students’ readiness and ability to identify unmet clinical needs and challenges and to develop solutions and/or products to address these unmet needs and challenges. The proposed model leveraged a local hospital Summer “Student Experience Educational” program to facilitate the clinical experience.
The study utilized various surveying models to collect comprehensive datasets of participants feedback and key clinical unmet needs and challenges. Biomedical engineering students’ feedback was obtained from questionnaires prepared by the research group pre- and post-immersion. Three different questionnaires were prepared: a Career Aspiration questionnaire, an Engineering Design Self-efficacy questionnaire, and a Trends & Behavior questionnaire. All questionnaires were filled in the university. All questionnaires were approved by the educational institution Institutional Review Board.
The implemented model resulted in clinically informed BME students who are certain about their career aspirations into becoming engineers engaging in designed and development activities, who are also certain about their structured technology-driven problem-solving skills. After the immersion experience, participated BME students reported improvement in their abilities to perform key engineering tasks such as documenting technical matters, learning new things and research, empathize with observed clinical needs and challenges, identifying unmet clinical needs, and effectively communicating with nurses. One of the identified clinical challenges was selected by 2 of the participating BME students to be the focus of their senior capstone design project.
Unlike other immersion programs, the new proposed model provided students with a prolonged summer clinical experience (68 hours in 4 clinical departments) with a specific and consistent group of healthcare providers, experienced nurses. This selection and consistency with whom to be with in the clinical setting were proven to be valuable in achieving the immersion experience goals.