Effectiveness of the use of simulation training in healthcare education

Abstract

The focus of the research programme within this thesis is an investigation of scenario-based simulation training in undergraduate healthcare education. The aim of the main study was to determine the effectiveness of high-fidelity simulation training with adult branch nursing students. Their acquisition of knowledge and skills was tested using a 15-station Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) pre- and post- the simulation intervention with randomised control and experimental groups of volunteer students. The results show that simulation training is an effective learning method as students from the experimental group, who were given the opportunity to observe and take part in high-fidelity simulation training followed by debriefing, made significantly higher improvements between their two OSCE performances than students from the control group.

The second study focused on interprofessional learning with a randomised control group investigation of the students’ knowledge of the roles and skills of other healthcare professions involved in the same simulation session. The results demonstrate that observing and taking part in multidisciplinary scenarios and their debriefings contributed to the students’ acquisition of knowledge about the roles and skills of other health professionals. The study also showed that students’ perception of multidisciplinary team working was significantly influenced by whether or not they had experienced interprofessional high-fidelity scenario-based simulation training.

The main original themes emerging from the research work presented in this thesis comprise the implementation of high-fidelity scenario-based simulation training and debriefing with undergraduate students from a range of healthcare disciplines and the objective measure of the effectiveness of such learning opportunities. This work has now started to impact on simulation practice in undergraduate education within the University and beyond