Virtual Patients

Through training with virtual patients, nurses are able to provide a better quality of patient care. Nurses work with virtual patients in simulated worlds as they would with actual patients; they assess and care for the patient’s needs. By using virtual patients, nurses are able to obtain clinical reasoning skills, experience, and confidence in a risk-free atmosphere (Kaddoura, 2010). Learning by experiences and through mistakes is an effective way to acquire a deeper understanding of the skills and knowledge nurses need. A mistake in a simulated world on a virtual patient is not a mistake that is going to harm an actual patient. Nurses need experiences with virtual patients in order to learn from virtual mistakes and provide a safer environment

Nurses are also introduced to a variety of uncommon illnesses/cases through virtual patients (Kaddoura, 2010). Nursing students may not see those kinds of illnesses in their clinicals, but with virtual patients, they can experience it and have better skills to assess future patients with uncommon illnesses. In addition to uncommon illnesses, nursing instructors have certain common illnesses that they want all of their students to experience in a clinical setting. Due to limited clinical instruction time and too few clinical spots, some nursing students do not experience all of those common cases during their clinical training (Kaddoura, 2010). Using virtual patients as a supplement to clinical experiences and instruction is an efficient way for all nursing students to have comprehensive and diverse training and experiences. When nurses have extensive training, an understanding of the patients’ needs/perspective, and are able to acquire confidence, they will be more competent and empathetic health care providers for their

The positive correlation between learning with virtual patients and nursing students abilities to apply theory into safe practice has several implications for instructors, hospitals, and nurses. Nursing instructors need to assist with the development of virtual patients in order to create useful, realistic teaching-learning simulations to help supplement their student’s learning. Hospitals need to invest in virtual patients to be used as continuing education requirements for their nurses and provide adequate supplemental resources for nursing students in clinicals at their centers. Nurses need to use virtual patients as a continued source of instruction and practice with “varied complex disease processes and advanced nursing procedures” in order to prepare for future patients. Another implication for virtual patients is its use in medical training in developing countries. Countries with limited resources, facilities, and medical training professionals could greatly benefit from the use of virtual patients and worlds. Simulated learning through virtual patients can be used to increase the number of students being trained in developing worlds; this increase in trained health care professionals could provide the countries with more skilled and