Simulation Team

Simulation is an immersive educational approach that replicates real-life scenarios to enhance participants' knowledge, skills, and confidence while ensuring patient safety. As defined by Hawker et al. (2022), it provides a secure and meaningful environment for individuals to learn from mistakes without any harm to patients, nurturing the development of their competencies and attitudes.

At DPT, simulation complements traditional learning methods, offering an engaging and interactive training experience. Our Simulation Team specialises in clinical education, collaborating with clinical leads to tailor courses that meets their training requirements. We provide the learning environment, equipment, and course facilitation, as well as offering technical guidance on simulation-based training.

Simulation is an adjunct to traditional methods of learning and encourages an enjoyable and immersive training experience to make it more fun and interactive. Within DPT, Simulation has more commonly been built into existing training for clinical staff and is used to improve patient safety outcomes.

Read our Spotlight On - Simulation Training Team to hear from the team about what the training involves, what they enjoy most about being part of this team and some of their key achievements.

Our Location

The Simulation Team is currently based at Avon House, situated in Langdon Hospital, Dawlish.

Workplace Systems-Probing:

Simulation also has links to human factors and patient safety, where simulation methods are used to test new or existing systems and processes to identify and eliminate latent safety hazards, developing safer systems for improved patient safety outcomes. This approach was initially employed to test the Place of Safety Suite at Wonford House. More recently, it was used to stress-test the environment and systems on Salus Ward before it was opened to service-users.

The three-day Salus Ward Project involved a series of simulations, including patient-facing staff, senior managers, a range of patient safety and quality improvement experts, estates and facilities workers and a health and safety officer. This project led to the identification of over eighty concerns, which were later formatted into a task and finish group for further monitoring and mitigation. The project also involved MSc Nursing students from Exeter University, providing them with the opportunity to experience life through the eyes of an inpatient on a acute mental health ward. This project was nominated as a finalist for the 'HSJ Patient Safety Pilot Project of the Year Award 2023'.

Simulation National Framework:

The diagram below was extracted from the National Strategic Vision of Sim in Health and Care (Health Education England, 2020). It summarises the various ways in which, simulation can help to support individual training needs and promote service-user, staffing, organisational and strategic outcomes.