Instructional Innovation Seed Grant Award - $2,500
Allison Duffy, PharmD, BCOP (School of Pharmacy)
Integrating virtual patient simulation in pharmacy and interdisciplinary learning
This grant will allow Dr. Duffy to explore virtual patient simulation products available for health care education and summarize our findings. After this initial assessment, she hopes to develop a virtual patient simulation experience. Her team plans to pilot this experience first in a group of pharmacy learners. If the pilot is successful, her team intend to expand to other pharmacy and inter-professional education forums.
Simulation based education (SBE) in advanced clinical pharmacy education has been shown to improve learner confidence, enhance fundamental knowledge, improve communication skills, stimulate critical thinking, and augment patient care. Virtual patients, a type of SBE, are defined as interactive computer simulations of real-life, challenging clinical scenarios for the purpose of health professions training, education, or assessment. Virtual patients have been identified as a valuable resource to develop communication and counseling skills as well as knowledge retention and clinical reasoning skills.