Using Simulation for Patient Practice

Simulation is being used more and more in nursing schools as well as in other types of educational situations for experienced nurses.

Christine Park, MD, president of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare, a professor of anesthesiology and medical education and co-director of the Graham Clinical Performance Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago, took time to answer questions about simulation and how it’s being utilized in the nursing field.

“Simulation is a technique that creates a situation or environment to allow people to experience a representation of a real event for the purpose of practice, learning, evaluations, testing, or to gain understanding of systems or human actions,” Park explains. “In health care, we use an exciting array of methodologies, including simulated task trainers, mannequins, full-scale environments, virtual and augmented reality, and even simulated patients. That means we can simulate anything from an ‘arm’ for a nursing student to practice starting an intravenous line, to difficult conversations, to training interprofessional teams in hospitals, to testing system-wide patient safety solutions before deployment.”

So why should the nursing field use simulation as opposed to having nurses immediately working on actual patients?