Do You See What I See?
Ears make DNP student Zarah Safdari nervous.
"Let the tech in!"
DNP student and critical care nurse Amy Raskin, who's in professor Dawn Bourne's Advanced Health Assessment course
“I practice on my husband but always have a really hard time,” said Safdari, a stay-at-home mom of four who's worked as an emergency and travel nurse and plans to become a primary care nurse practitioner after graduation. “It’s hard to see what you’re looking for. Even when we were practicing in the lab with otoscopes, and a lab partner, the ear drum can be really hard to find.”
It’s why Safdari especially appreciates assistant professor Dawn Bourne’s (BSN ’04, MSN ’10, DNP ’16) demonstrations with a special new kind of otoscope, which is mounted with a tiny, powerful magnifying camera, in the Advanced Health Assessment course she’s in that allows Zafdari and her 89 first-year MSN and DNP student peers to see deep inside the patient’s ear to the tympanic membrane—wax, ear hair, and all—and beam it onto the classroom’s big screen, as Bourne narrates.
“It helps me see what a professional does and sees,” Safdari said, from her seat in the back of the classroom, “and what it’s all supposed to look like.”
Starting this fall, advanced practice nursing students have a new tool to help improve their skills mastery. Thanks to an international partnership with UK-based Global Health Education Group and a UVA pilot program being championed by the provost’s office—the first American university to use the tech—clinician-educators like Bourne “know that students see exactly what I see, and what they should see, and in real time.”
The tech—which includes a HIPAA-compliant online platform and some Inspector Gadget-looking gear, including camera-enabled otoscopes, dermatoscopes, and a pair of smart spectacles that faculty don—is important not just because it helps build future NPs’ skills and confidence, Bourne explained, but also because it equalizes access to experiences nursing and medical students sometimes might not otherwise have.
“In nursing and medicine, it’s often just your lucky day if you happen to be in the clinic or hospital when something unusual happens,” said Bourne. “This helps us equalize opportunities and integrate it across the curriculum, so, for a seminar class, say, a clinician can just send out an email and say, ‘Hey, tomorrow at 1 PM, I have a patient on my schedule that I’m doing a cognitive assessment on. Please log on.’”
The devices will also allow students slip into virtual spaces in less obtrusive but still powerful and meaningful ways.
“It will be useful when there are more sensitive topics, like end-of-life care, where it changes the mood in the room if we have a bunch of students in there, pressed up against the wall, watching,” she said. “They need to see it and know how to do it, and there’s evidence that this technology can help it feel less intrusive to patients than if they’re actually in the room.”
For now, the gear is a complement to both the didactic and hands-on skills-building labs students do. But, given the premium on clinical practice space, it may also be used during real visits with consenting patients, a scenario the provost’s office is investigating down the line.
First-year DNP students like Amy Raskin, a critical care nurse at Rockingham Memorial Hospital, are enthusiastic.
“Let the tech in!” laughed Raskin, who, during her day job, is learning to how to use a new Bluetooth-enabled stethoscope to discuss patients’ symptoms with providers. “Then maybe we’ll feel a little more groomed, sure that we know what we’re doing, and not fumbling around.”
The new learning tool comes at a critical time for UVA’s advanced practice nursing programs, especially its newly hybrid Doctor of Nursing Practice program, which between 2024 and 2025 saw enrollment more than double, from 72 students in 2024 to 145 earlier this fall. It’s also a key part of how the School is addressing the AACN Essentials mandates rolled out to improve students’ readiness at the bedside and beyond.
Bourne, who helped transform the DNP program’s structure from one that required students to be on Grounds about 15 times each semester to one that requires in-person classes about six times each semester, says the tech is a complement that will strengthen students’ knowledge and truly prepare them for the challenges and opportunities of advanced practice roles.
It’ll also “remove luck from the equation,” Bourne explained.
“There are lots of things we don’t get to do a lot of, or don’t see often,” said Bourne, “and this tech offers access to those scenarios. The platform will be a tool to help translate what students learn from textbooks and class to real patient scenarios, allowing them to experience a wider variety of patient visits and scenarios that will strengthen their learning.”
