The Simulated Hospital Environment: Implementation

While typical simulations in nursing focus on task-training using high fidelity simulators, this approach lacks the integration needed for nursing practice in the real world. This presentation will describe how the 96-hour simulated hospital environment was implemented to address those needed integration skills.

The process began with coordinating inter- and intra-departmental university resources needed to support the 96-hour simulated hospital environment. In addition, the team identified external factors affecting the around-the-clock enterprise, and secured the electronic health record and audio-visual support.

The project team envisioned involvement of nursing students across educational programs in the College. The doctoral elective brought together nurses with varied nursing education and experiences to design the script. This process was facilitated by a NASA engineer with 10 years experience as an astronaut instructor.

The script focused on soon-to-be graduating senior nursing students functioning in the role of entry-level registered nurses. A secondary goal was to provide nurse practitioner students with a similar experience in the provider role. Junior nursing students functioned as nurse assistants. Since nursing is relational, the team determined that it was essential to have human patients, therefore, master’s students acted as patients.

Space industry methods guided the development of high fidelity simulation in normal, healthy, human actors. Scripted critical patient events were derived from the experiential diversity of the script-writing team and enhanced the nursing students’ learning.

The project team and doctoral students directed the implementation of the script. Faculty across educational programs assisted with execution and evolution of the script. Scheduled debriefs occurred at the end of each shift.

Nursing education should be challenged with designing innovative learning activities that go beyond current pedagogy. This integrated simulation provided a unique opportunity for student-faculty collaboration across the curriculum.