How simulated patients contribute to student learning in an authentic way, an interview study.

Introduction: Simulated patients (SPs) play an instrumental role in teaching communication skills and enhancing learning outcomes. Prior research mostly focused on the SP's contribution to students' learning outcomes by providing feedback afterwards. A detailed understanding of the contribution of the SP during SP-student encounters is currently lacking although the majority of the interaction between SPs and students occurs during the SP-student encounter.

Collaboration Scripts or Checklists to Engage Novice Observers in Immersive Simulation?

Introduction: In simulation, students often observe their peers perform a task. It is still unclear how different types of instructional guidance can turn the observational phase into an active learning experience for novices. This mixed-method study aims to understand similarities and differences between use of collaboration scripts and checklists by observers in terms of cognitive load and perception of learning.

Task complexity and cognitive load in simulation-based education: A randomised trial.

Introduction: When designing simulation for novices, educators aim to design tasks and environments that are complex enough to promote learning but not too complex to compromise task performance and cause cognitive overload. This study aimed to determine the impact of modulating task and environment complexity on novices' performance and cognitive load during simulation.

Methods: Second-year pharmacy students (N = 162) were randomly assigned to one of four conditions (2 × 2 factorial design) in simulation: simple task in simple environment, complex task in simple environment, simple task in complex environment and complex task in complex environment.

Medical Students' Learning Process During Simulated Patient Consultations in Psychiatry: A Grounded Theory Study.

Introduction: Recent changes in psychiatric care and teaching, which limit patient contact for medical students, can be partially overcome by simulation-based education in psychiatry. The authors explored the learning processes of medical students during meetings with simulated patients to inform efforts to improve this teaching.

Methods: After recruiting 81 undergraduate medical students from 3 universities to participate in 6 simulation sessions in psychiatry, the authors purposively sampled 21 students to participate in face-to-face individual semistructured interviews analyzed with constructivist grounded theory.

The contribution of simulated patients to meaningful student learning.

Introduction: Communication training with simulated patients (SPs) is widely accepted as a valuable and effective means of teaching communication skills. However, it is unclear which elements within SP-student encounters make these learning experiences meaningful. This study focuses on the SP's role during meaningful learning of the student by giving an in-depth understanding of the contribution of the SP from a student perspective.

Training Residents in Advance Care Planning: A Task-Based Needs Assessment Using the 4-Component Instructional Design.

Background: Residents may learn how to perform advance care planning (ACP) through informal curriculum. Task-based instructional designs and recent international consensus statements for ACP provide opportunities to explicitly train residents, but residents' needs are poorly understood.

Objective: We assessed residents' training needs in ACP at the Geneva University Hospitals in Geneva, Switzerland.

Effectiveness of simulation in psychiatry for nursing students, nurses and nurse practitioners: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Aims: Mental disorders constitute one of the main causes of disease and disability worldwide. While nurses are often at the frontline of mental health care, they have limited access to dedicated psychiatric training opportunities. Simulation training may foster the development of the appropriate competencies required when supporting people with mental disorders.

Fifteen simulated patient working formats to use in communication skills training: Report of a survey.

Objective: Simulated and standardized patients (SPs) are increasingly being used in communication skills training for healthcare professionals' education. Despite this broad use of SPs, there is no recent literature with an overview on SP working formats being used. We ran a study to fill this gap.

Simulation Training in Psychiatry for Medical Education: A Review.

Despite recognised benefits of Simulation-Based Education (SBE) in healthcare, specific adaptations required within psychiatry have slowed its adoption. This article aims to discuss conceptual and practical features of SBE in psychiatry that may support or limit its development, so as to encourage clinicians and educators to consider the implementation of SBE in their practice. SBE took off with the aviation industry and has been steadily adopted in clinical education, alongside role play and patient educators, across many medical specialities.

Assessing the validity of an OSCE developed to assess rare, emergent or complex clinical conditions in endocrinology & metabolism.

Background: Assessment of emergent, rare or complex medical conditions in Endocrinology and Metabolism (E&M) is an integral component of training. However, data is lacking on how this could be best achieved. The purpose of this study was to develop and administer an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) for E&M residents, and to gather validity evidence for its use.

Manifesto for healthcare simulation practice.

A pandemic has sent the world into chaos. It has not only upended our lives; hundreds of thousands of lives have already been tragically lost. The global crisis has been disruptive, even a threat, to healthcare simulation, affecting all aspects of operations from education to employment.

Understanding Medical Students' Attitudes Toward Learning eHealth: Questionnaire Study.

Background: Several publications on research into eHealth demonstrate promising results. Prior researchers indicated that the current generation of doctors is not trained to take advantage of eHealth in clinical practice. Therefore, training and education for everyone using eHealth are key factors to its successful implementation.

Learning in Pediatric Emergency Situations: A Qualitative Study of Residents' Perspectives.

Objectives: To explore resident learning in the context of emergency situations. The guiding research questions were: How do residents learn in emergency situations? What factors facilitate or hinder their learning?

Design: A qualitative approach was used in order to understand the different perspectives of participants and explore the context of emergency situations. Aware of the complex sociocultural interactions in emergency situations, we used the methodology of constructivist grounded theory.

Simulation in psychiatry for medical doctors: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Context: Most medical doctors are likely to work with patients experiencing mental health conditions. However, educational opportunities for medical doctors to achieve professional development in the field of psychiatry are often limited. Simulation training in psychiatry may be a useful tool to foster this development.

"Learning the Lingo": A Grounded Theory Study of Telephone Talk in Clinical Education.

Purpose: Workplace-learning literature has focused on doing, but clinical practice also involves talking. Clinicians talk not only with patients but also about patients with other health professionals, frequently by telephone. The authors examined how the underexplored activity of work-related telephone talk influences physicians' clinical education.

Simulation-based education for novices: complex learning tasks promote reflective practice.

Context: Simulated clinical immersion (SCI), in which clinical situations are simulated in a realistic environment, safely and gradually exposes novices to complex problems. Given their limited experience, undergraduate students can potentially be quite overwhelmed by SCI learning tasks, which may result in misleading learning outcomes. Although task complexity should be adapted to the learner's level of expertise, many factors, both intrinsic and extraneous to the learning task, can influence perceived task complexity and its impact on cognitive processes.

Expressive instructions: ethnographic insights into the creativity and improvisation entailed in teaching physical skills to medical students.

Introduction: Creativity and improvisation are recognized as important aspects of training expertise in domains such as business and the arts, yet rarely discussed in medical education. This article examines how creativity and improvisation play out in the ways teachers give 'expressive instructions' to medical students when teaching physical skills.

Methods: Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in a medical school in Maastricht, the Netherlands, with first, second and third year students learning physical examination skills.

Learning how to learn using simulation: Unpacking disguised feedback using a qualitative analysis of doctors' telephone talk.

Introduction: Telephone talk between clinicians represents a substantial workplace activity in postgraduate clinical education, yet junior doctors receive little training in goal-directed, professional telephone communication.

Aim: To assess educational needs for telephone talk and develop a simulation-based educational intervention.

Methods: Thematic analysis of 17 semi-structured interviews with doctors-in-training from various training levels and specialties.

Standardized Patients' Perspectives on Workplace Satisfaction and Work-Related Relationships: A Multicenter Study.

Introduction: The use of standardized patients (SPs) in health care education has grown in the last 50 years. In addition, the requirements for SPs have increased steadily, and thus, the work of SPs has become more difficult and demanding. It has been claimed that SP programs are highly contextualized, having emerged from local, institutional, professional, and national conditions, but their effects on SPs have not been investigated.

Stress and anxiety management strategies in health professions' simulation training: a review of the literature.

Introduction: Simulation training has been used to teach clinical skills to health profession trainees. Stress and/or anxiety occur in high-acuity scenarios in the clinical environment, and affect clinician performance and patient outcomes. To date, strategies that have been used in conjunction with simulation training for healthcare professionals that address stress management are limited.

Development, implementation, and evaluation of a mental rehearsal strategy to improve clinical performance and reduce stress: A mixed methods study.

Background: Mental rehearsal is a form of mental training that has been used by physicians and nurses to improve performance of clinical skills, and as a vital component of stress management training. To help novice nurses deal with often stressful clinical events that require the processing of information essential to patient management, a mental rehearsal strategy was developed and implemented in a Year 3 nursing simulation program. Inherent to mental rehearsal is imagery, which facilitates cognitive and affective modification, and reduction of extraneous cognitive load.

Comparison of standardized patients with high-fidelity simulators for managing stress and improving performance in clinical deterioration: A mixed methods study.

Background: The use of standardized patients in deteriorating patient simulations adds realism that can be valuable for preparing nurse trainees for stress and enhancing their performance during actual patient deterioration. Emotional engagement resulting from increased fidelity can provide additional stress for student nurses with limited exposure to real patients. To determine the presence of increased stress with the standardized patient modality, this study compared the use of standardized patients (SP) with the use of high-fidelity simulators (HFS) during deteriorating patient simulations.

Effect of comprehensive oncogenetics training interventions for general practitioners, evaluated at multiple performance levels.

General practitioners (GPs) are increasingly called upon to identify patients at risk for hereditary cancers, and their genetic competencies need to be enhanced. This article gives an overview of a research project on how to build effective educational modules on genetics, assessed by randomized controlled trials (RCTs), reflecting the prioritized educational needs of primary care physicians. It also reports on an ongoing study to investigate long-term increase in genetic consultation skills (1-year follow-up) and interest in and satisfaction with a supportive website on genetics among GPs.