Description/Overview: Alternatives to clinical placements have become a necessity for specialized nursing education. Pediatric nursing education requires interventions for acute and chronic care incorporating family centered dynamics, education, advocacy, and age appropriate bio-psycho-social nursing care. Clinical pediatric placements are increasingly challenging to provide for student nurses. Due to the limited availability of clinical sites and the inconsistent exposure to varied pediatric clients, ages, and disease processes student nurses are limited in their practicum. The integration of infant and pediatric human simulation within the nursing curriculum provides the Nursing faculty and students with a modality for the demonstration of safe nursing interventions and the development of critical thinking. Through a constructivist educational approach human simulation utilizes the cognitive, tactile, affective and auditory domains of learning. The inclusion of human simulation provides a “real life” and “real time” collaborative experience for student nurses replicating the clinical setting. This symposium will explore the development of pediatric scenarios, the curriculum development and implementation phases. The lessons learned will be examined and the self-efficacious beliefs of baccalaureate student nurse’s pre and post simulation described. This evidence based practice pediatric human simulation program is applicable to the global nursing education community at large.

Learner Objective #1: At the conclusion of this symposium the learner will be able to identify pediatric human simulation components for integration within a Baccalaureate nursing program.

Learner Objective #2: The learner will explore the dynamic components of pediatric human simulation program development from theory to implementation.