Real life learning. Alternative to clinical skills development

1. Pressure from educational institutions on clinical facilities necessitates the creation of alternative strategies that enable students to develop clinical skills outside the artificial atmosphere of a nursing laboratory or the formal clinical setting. 2. Assignments covering grief and loss experienced by the elderly; problems in performing activities of daily living experienced by the non-elderly; and existential anxieties experienced by the elderly help students to realize that such problems are not confined to those residing in institutional settings. 3. Each of these assignments sensitizes students to the practical reality of a variety of theoretical frameworks, which provides students with the opportunity of applying theory to practice in a nonthreatening environment.