Does Simulation Improve Patient Safety?: Self-Efficacy, Competence, Operational Performance, and Patient Safety

Simulation training is an essential educational strategy for health care systems to improve patient safety. The strength of simulation training is its suitability for multidisciplinary team training. There is good evidence that simulation training improves provider and team self-efficacy and competence on manikins. There is also good evidence that procedural simulation improves actual operational performance in clinical settings. However, no evidence yet shows that crew resource management training through simulation, despite its promise, improves team operational performance at the bedside. Also, no evidence to date proves that simulation training actually improves patient outcome. Even so, confidence is growing in the validity of medical simulation as the training tool of the future. The use of medical simulation will continue to grow in the context of multidisciplinary team training for patient safety.