Журнал сестринского дела и ухода

Virtual Patients in Emergency Nursing Training

Abstract

Tudor Calinici

Emergency nurses are specialized to provide rapid assessment and treatment to patients in the initial phase of illness or trauma and often in life-threatening situations. They are required to have a lot of knowledge –not only in medical area - and to possess multiple abilities which will enable them to face different situation that may occur. Due to different constrains – time, money, ethical considerations, etc., the institutions which provide training for emergency nurses are forced to find alternative methods to reach all the outcomes required in real life situations. One of the methods is the use of virtual patients. The scope of this paper is to present the concept of virtual patients, to describe their main characteristics which recommend them to be used for training the emergency nurses and to present the main types of virtual patients.