By Emily Schoch | Staff Writer
National Healthcare Simulation Week, Sept. 16-20, celebrates healthcare simulations, which have been in use for around 20 years. The Louise Herrington School of Nursing shared their perspective on the importance of “SIMs” in the nursing school.
Shopha Tserotas is the director of simulations at the nursing school. Tserotas said it’s important to share how SIMs help in the nursing environment. Tserotas said that SIM should be a part of every health care teaching program because it allows students to practice medical scenarios on mannequins before on patients.
“The point of healthcare simulation is to help students have an opportunity to practice what they would do in actual clinical practice, so they have this safe space that is a controlled environment where they have an opportunity for instant feedback,” Tserotas said. “They’re able to take what they learn in practice, and they can take that to a clinical setting when they interact with their patients.”
The nursing school uses SIM to improve patient care by implementing it into their required prerequisites. Students are able to hone their skills, increasing patient care and lowering the chances for mistakes.
“SIM helps with their clinical judgment skills, and it helps to keep our patients safe,” Tserotas said.
The school has four levels of SIM training which students are required to go through in order to complete clinicals. Each level progressively gets more advanced, ending at level four where the student should feel fully prepared to take care of patients.
“In our first level of nursing, we have a simulation experience where they get to practice communication skills with one of our high-fidelity mannequins, or what’s called a standardized patient,” Tserotas said. “During that simulation, they get an eye-opening experience talking to patients, because the mannequin will say and ask things that students need to respond to in a healthcare format, which gives them a really good opportunity to learn how to professionally communicate with their patients.”
Tserotas said that after the SIM, they debrief. During the debrief, they talk with students about what they did well and what could have gone better. According to Tserotas, the students become much more confident after completing the SIM because they can see their mistakes without the high stakes of a real patient.
McKinney nursing student Sydney Lewis said SIM has improved her credibility as a nursing student. It gave her real experience while allowing her to make mistakes. Mistakes are inevitable in the medical profession, and that’s why it is so important to become confident on mannequins before moving to real patients, Lewis said.
“The teachers speak to you on the other side of the wall and your professor is grading you in the control room,” Lewis said. “They can all see what you’re doing. They control the mannequin and all the functions with that and it basically looks exactly like a hospital room, which is really realistic. I think that the technology is really helpful in our success.”
According to Lewis, the SIM setting before clinicals helps her balance talking to patients and doing her nursing intervention and helps her to think on her feet.
“Acknowledging SIMs at a national level is really important because it makes people understand how we improve health outcomes for our patients,” Tserotas said. “We do that by giving people ample opportunities to practice and get feedback during a simulated clinical scenario, so that they can take what they’ve learned into a real life scenario.”
