Integrating Design Thinking Into Undergraduate Nursing Education to Nurture Empathy and Enhance Empathetic Communication: a Wait List RCT
Integrating Design Thinking Into Undergraduate Nursing Education to Nurture Empathy and Enhance Empathetic Communication: a Wait List RCT
The goal of this randomized controlled trial is to test whether an AI-assisted design thinking workshop can improve empathetic communication in undergraduate nursing students at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. The main questions it aims to answer are:
Does the workshop improve students' empathy, creativity, collaboration, problem-solving, and patient-centred care attitudes?
How do students experience the design thinking and AI-supported learning activities?
Researchers will compare the intervention group with a wait-list control group to see whether the workshop leads to better outcomes.
Participants will:
complete a baseline questionnaire before the workshop;
be randomly assigned to receive the workshop now or later;
attend two tutorials in the intervention group, including design thinking activities and AI-simulated clinical scenarios;
complete a follow-up questionnaire after the workshop;
and, for some participants, join a short interview about their learning experience.
Inclusion Criteria:
Exclusion Criteria:
whchan@cuhk.edu.hk+852 39436218
The study uses a mixed-methods, wait-list randomized controlled trial to evaluate an AI-assisted design thinking workshop for undergraduate nursing students. First, an AI chatbot is co-designed in Phase 1 with 8 nursing faculty members and 8-10 students through a 3-hour workshop, followed by 4-6 weeks of chatbot development and validation. The workshop uses design thinking activities including empathy mapping, patient journey mapping, "How Might We" framing, prototyping, and feedback gathering to define learning needs and chatbot functions. The IT team then builds the chatbot using the workshop outputs, including scenario scripts, response frameworks, assessment criteria, and bilingual English/Cantonese requirements. In Phase 2, 80 eligible Year 2 nursing students are randomly assigned to an intervention group or a wait-list control group. All participants complete baseline and post-intervention questionnaires measuring empathy, creativity, collaboration, problem-solving, and patient-centred care attitudes. The intervention group receives two 90-minute tutorials: one on design thinking fundamentals and one on AI-simulated clinical scenarios. During the second tutorial, students rotate through different scenarios while tutors provide small-group guidance. Participants in the intervention group may also take part in semi-structured interviews to describe their experiences. Quantitative data will be summarized descriptively, and qualitative data from interviews, open-ended responses, and workshop observations will be analyzed using content analysis.
khanhnguyen@cuhk.edu.hk+852 39435120