The Simulation Champions are a large team of academic and professional staff who share a joint vision and passion for clinical skills training through simulated placements. The team delivers, evaluates and researches clinical skills simulation within the School of Health Sciences at the University of Liverpool. The students are working towards a range of professions including medical imaging, nursing, occupational therapy, orthoptics, physiotherapy and therapeutic radiography. The team is diverse but share a common background with a desire for inter-professional working, learning and teaching. The work focuses on the role of simulated placements as partial alternative for clinical department placements. Reducing student clinical training time reduces the logistical impact on students and departments, while use of simulated placements to deliver skills training makes clinical placements more effective and efficient. One of the most important projects to date was a large-scale “Delphi” consensus study which gathered opinions from experts and stakeholders in order to identify to what extent student clinical training can be replaced with simulated placement time. The project determined that 10 percent to 30 percent was the agreed partial replacement ratio. Supporting this work was a series of studies that evaluated the impact of simulated placements and importantly, demonstrated equivalence of learning between randomised simulation and clinical cohorts.
The simulated placement solutions developed, provide students with a comprehensive and realistic experience that challenges them to work with a range of 'patients' equipment and scenarios. Students engage with a range of resources including high fidelity virtual reality software, ageing simulation suits, actors and hospital wheelchairs. The wheelchair proficiency test is a particularly popular activity. These findings were particularly helpful during the clinical placement restrictions due to Covid-19. The research and developments have been shared internationally and the team are now working alongside government and professional bodies in order to implement the findings. Although this is a large team, the shared passion and desire for interprofessional working means this group works closely together, sharing resources, ideas, time and energy to support each other.