TDNet Discover

In many instances medical students are taught basic patient care including complicated procedures on actual patients, posing a risk of harm and dissatisfying patient care. Simulationbased education was designed to offer an alternative environment for students to practice and learn that did not bear the risk of patient harm. The objective of this systematic review is to assess the effectiveness of both traditional educational and simulation-based learning (SBL) models in the production of the most well prepared, efficient medical practitioners by reviewing the effects on patient care. MEDLINE complete and PubMed were the databases utilized to find systematic reviews, meta-analysis, and randomized control trials that answered the question of whether or not SBL improved patient care. Two reviewers completed the primary article review before the articles were assessed using a quality assessment tool. Once assessed for quality a third independent reviewer made the final inclusion decision. Of this process eight final articles were included in the review. The qualitative analysis of these articles showed an increase in student confidence, satisfaction, patient care results, successful procedure completion, and decreased medical complications in students trained through SBL. One study found that SBL is a safe alternative to real patient interaction. However, many studies mentioned that SBL does not replace traditional education, but instead is best used in conjunction with traditional methods. Future research is needed to determine the efficacy of SBL in other fields of medicine and to remain accurate and up to date with the ever-changing medical field.