Simulators are Under-used

I thoroughly enjoyed the article “Assessing Competency With the Use of Human Patient Simulation in the Emergency Department” in the September 2009 issue. This article discussed how patient simulators are being used to determine nurse competency in the emergency department. Gomez did an excellent job of explaining how competency can be measured with the simulators and how different scenarios can unfold with the simulator. She also discussed the benefits of patient simulators and how helpful they really are.

I believe a discussion about the under-use of simulators should have been added to the article. Nurse competency is an important factor in safe patient care, and patient simulation has been shown to reduce medical errors and promote critical thinking.1 The human patient simulator has many advantages that should be utilized. The ability of a program to react to interventions such as medication given provides an amazing learning opportunity. As a nursing student who attends a college that has a human patient simulator, I have had the opportunity to work with it and learned much from the experience. However, I can only count a few times when we were able to use the simulator. I believe that simulators should be used more often both to test competency and as a learning tool. Thank you for the opportunity to respond to this article.