Nursing Training Mannequin Use: The Right Format

 

An increasing number of nursing schools are offering nursing simulation scenarios to students to better train tomorrow's nurses, today, and as a direct response to the increased scrutiny of nurses and other health care professionals to provide safe, effective care.

Among the trends in nursing education, providing more experiential learning opportunity than instruction and increasing the use of learning technology which includes medical simulation is helping nursing students become more proficient in technology that can help them save lives in real-life clinical situations. Decreases opportunities for clinical placements, combined with increased patient safety issues and ethical concerns, has also led to a drop in the number of opportunities available to nursing students for direct experience with patient care. The Nursing Training Mannequin is important there.

·        Simulation provides a way to make up for this - it provides nursing students with opportunities to practice their clinical and decision-making skills through various real-life situational experiences. What's more, this increased use of simulation and nursing simulation scenarios, specifically, is also being driven by trends like a shortage of nurse educators and patient confidentiality concerns at hospital-based clinical training sites.

·        But simulated teaching has become so high tech, that it's not only for nursing students to use for practice, but it's also being used by new nursing graduates, as well as more experienced nurses who want to learn more, or improve upon, their skills. This simulated training is extremely useful, because, for one, as our nation's population ages, we will need more nurses to become more proficient in their care in order to take care of this patient demographic. Plus, many studies show that simulation-based nursing education interventions have strong educational effects.

Benefits of simulated learning for nurses

There are various types of simulation: Screen-based/PC-based simulation, virtual patients, human patient simulator and integrated models, to name a few. High-fidelity simulations involve the use of computerized mannequins that can be programmed to exhibit a wide range of patient conditions. Used for years in medical schools and the military, high-fidelity patient simulations (HPS) has become essential for many nursing schools, as they promote skills acquisition, aid development of clinical judgment, and teach students about complex clinical situations with lifelike examples - all without exposing “real" patients to unnecessary risk.