SIMULATED PATIENT TRAINING FOR HEALTH ASSESSMENT IN A HIGH-FIDELITY NURSING SIMULATION

This paper describes the design of simulated patient (SP) training for health assessment in a high-fidelity nursing simulation. Trainers are the senior teachers qualified for SP training. Thirteen voluntary trainees are recruited from senior Baccalaureate nursing students who completed the course learning of health assessment and medical-surgical nursing. The first stage is general orientation and knowledge education (six hours). The trainees clarified their responsibilities and understand the roles and challenges of SPs. The second stage is simulation training (twelve hours). The simulated scenarios are developed using a computer-controlled human patient simulator (SimMan). The trainees clarified the patient's personality and discussed how to portray the patient condition by means of body language or gestures or verbal responses. The trainers provide the nuances that will make the patient come to life. The third stage is to train SP as a reviewer for the standardized performance (two hours). The checklist of candidate performance includes symptom assessment, physical examination, history inquires and communication. Each stage was videotaped in order to provide detailed feedback to the trainees. The trainees are evaluated in disease knowledge, role performance, imitation fidelity and communication with three levels (2 acceptable, 1 need to be improved, 0 unacceptable) by two trainers. The SP performance should remain the accuracy in 85% or higher. The inter-rater reliability for checklist is established. In summary, students as SPs would have first-hand knowledge and experience within the simulated scenarios. Multiple SP encounters need to be designed for more comprehensive clinical skills training.