Investing in your future; nursing simulation development

The School of Healthcare Sciences is currently involved in a 3 year European erasmus and strategic partnership for higher education to develop simulation education as a resource for adult nursing.

The project known as iSPAD (Innovative – simulation pedagogy for academic development) is a higher education partnership which began in December 2016. The main coordinator of the project is University of Malta, however, the project also includes representatives from a number of other European higher education sectors across Ireland, UK, Finland, Italy and Norway.

Simulation plays an important part in the education of nursing students. It is a safe way for them to practice clinical skills that are likely to be needed when in practice. The School of Healthcare Sciences has an abundance of simulation facilities and it is an integral part of our students learning.

The project produces a simulation scenario package named NURSE-KIT. The package consists of three community based scenarios with learning resources, one for each academic year throughout the nursing programme. As simulation education across Europe principally focuses on acute hospital based simulation, this Nurse -kit takes a novel approach to enhance community simulation resources for undergraduate students.

As part of iSPAD there is also a training programme to develop simulation champions. The training took place in Lahti University of Applied Sciences, Finland on June 12 2017 for 5 days. Sue Ward, Senior Lecturer: Adult Nursing and Director International Collaborative Provision and Clare Hawker, Lecturer: Adult Nursing & Director of Technologies both took part in the training and completed the associated assignment tasks in September 2017.

To find out more about this project please contact the project leads.