Development of simulation education debriefing protocol with faculty guide for enhancement clinical reasoning

BACKGROUND: The clinical environments are more complex, diverse and rapidly changing. Patients’ conditions were chronic and complexed, healthcare providers require clinical reasoning for patient safety care. One of the learning methods to foster clinical reasoning is simulation education. The aim of this study was to develop a simulation education debriefing protocol that can improve clinical reasoning. METHODS: This study was conducted following steps. For the first step, the literature review was performed to constitute a preliminary debriefing protocol. Secondly, content validity was evaluated by five simulation learning experts. Thirdly, in-depth interview was conducted to re-examine content validity with education experts. Finally, the final debriefing protocol was applied to 7 undergraduate nursing students to examine feasibility of the protocol. RESULTS: The protocol consisted of debriefing steps, learning outcome, clinical reasoning attributes, core questions and guideline for instructor. Results of applicability of debriefing protocol represented that participants mentioned their reasoning competency was improved and understood the overall flow of reasoning. CONCLUSIONS: The debriefing protocol is important to educate healthcare providers ‘clinical reasoning. It would be able to contribute to develop healthcare providers’ clinical competencies. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12909-019-1633-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.