Situational Judgment Exercise

The SJE is designed to offer the certificant an opportunity to experience a realistic situation that could be encountered in practice. The SJE provides a written clinical scenario where the certificant is asked to demonstrate critical reasoning and clinical application of content beyond the initial certification exam that allows for an in-depth assessment of the certificants approach to handling the complexity of situations without providing any risk to the public.

The purpose of the SJE is to test more complex situations and allow the certificant to provide an assessment of higher-order thinking related to a content area. Certificants must determine what information is important to gather and make decisions based on that information.

The rationale behind the SJE is to make recertification more meaningful and allow for the testing of complex clinical situations that are more difficult to get into in a typical multiple-choice exam. The SJE is being used by other health professionals and specialties and is also an important part of the continuing competence process. The SJE allows the certificant to compare their current knowledge, skills, and abilities to entry-level practice and for HPCC to assure that certified hospice and palliative APRNs and RNs have improved and grown their practice over the four-year certification period.

• Information gathering (IG) sections
• Decision-making (DM) sections (single or multiple DM)
• Problems normally contain two DM and approximately five DM sections

All choices are weighted (+2 to -2; and 0 weights are possible)

• +2: Of central importance for appropriate management of the situation – omission would result in serious damage to the client/patient in terms of cost, time, pain, risk of morbidity, and/or mortality.
• +1: Facilitative of good client/patient care.
• 0: Does not contribute to resolving the situation, but does not cause any harm in terms of cost, time, pain, risk of morbidity, and/or mortality; and/or may be a controversial option. Options are generally not designated by the author as 0 weight, rather, pretesting the scenarios can lead to a decision to change a positive or negative weight to 0.
• -1: Detrimental to handling the situation.
• -2: Gravely damaging to appropriate management of the situation, possibly resulting in serious damage to the client/patient or the public in terms of cost, time, pain, risk of morbidity, and/or mortality.

Passing scores are related to the judgment of Minimum Pass Levels (MPL) – that is, minimal competence

• Each IG and DM section has a different MPL
• Each problem has totals for IG and DM
• Overall score based on totals MPL for all IG and DM sections

CHPN:

• Meet or exceed MPL scores in both IG and DM: 20 points
• Meet or exceed MPL score in either IG or DM: 10 points
• Do not meet MPL scores in both IG or DM: 5 points

ACHPN:

• Meet or exceed MPL scores in both IG and DM: 25 points
• Meet or exceed MPL score in either IG or DM: 15 points
• Do not meet MPL scores in both IG or DM: 5 points