Facilitating higher order thinking skills in nurse education: a prototype database for teaching wound assessment and management skills.

The introduction of university based nurse education in Australia has nursing students spending more time in the classroom and less time in clinical settings. This decrease in clinical exposure may result in reduced opportunities for students to develop pertinent patient assessment and management skills. This is particularly true of skills required for effective wound assessment and management. Computerised databases offer an innovative method of teaching or refining these skills in a cost and time-effective manner without risk to patients or students. Such technology can also provide important grounding in data identification, hypothesis testing, problem solving and clinical decision making skills. This paper explores the underlying pedagogical principles of database use and describes the development of the prototype closed database, DECUBITUS. The prototype database included the following data fields; physical assessment, clinical diagnosis, risk assessment, wound assessment and treatment modality. The introduction of more sophisticated databases will permit the storage of visual images of actual wounds thus providing an additional dimension to the teaching of wound assessment and management.