HUMAN PATIENT SIMULATORS IN NURSING STUDENTS TRAINING

This paper presents an overview of the use of human patient simulators in the training of nursing students in the College of Nursing at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). The College houses a sixteen bed hospital laboratory, a four bed obstetric/pediatric laboratory and five high-fidelity simulation laboratories with examining rooms, facilitator control rooms and student/faculty debriefing rooms. Human patient simulators have been used for over forty years in medical education. Almost every nursing school in the U.S. now uses some form of human patient simulators in nursing training to improve deeper physiological and pathophysiological understanding, clinical judgment, critical thinking and clinical reasoning. This paper describes the new Center, its facilities and human patient simulators and the use of these simulators in training nursing students.