Virtual patient simulation in psychiatric care – A pilot study of digital support for collaborate learning

Psychiatric and mental health nursing is built on a trusted nurse and patient relationship. Therefore communication and clinical reasoning are two important issues. Our experiences as teachers in psychiatric educational programmes are that the students feel anxiety and fear before they start their clinical practices in psychiatry. Therefore there is a need for bridging over the fear. Technology enhanced learning might support such activities so we used Virtual patients (VPs), an interactive computer simulations of real-life clinical scenarios. The aim of this study was to investigate 4th term nursing students' opinions on the use of Virtual Patients for assessment in a Mental Health and Ill-health course module. We asked 24 volunteering students to practise with five different VP cases during almost 10 weeks before the exam. The participants were gathered together for participating in a written and an oral evaluation. The students were positive to the use of VPs in psychiatry and were very positive to use VPs in their continued nursing education. It seems that Virtual Patients can be an activity producing pedagogic model promoting students' independent knowledge development, critical thinking, reflection and problem solving ability for nurse students in psychiatric care.