The JHU School of Nursing’s 3,296 square foot Center for Simulation & Immersive Learning provides a setting for small and large group interactive immersive learning experiences for our pre-licensure and advanced practice students. Through these experiences, the center offers educators the opportunity to provide essential clinical experiences not guaranteed in the supervised clinical setting and the opportunity for safe, repetitive practice. To provide these experiences, the Center uses a variety of high-fidelity and low fidelity resources such as static manikins, patient simulator manikins, standardized patients, remote robot and virtual reality experiences. Additionally, the Center offers space and resources for faculty and staff and those from outside of the School of Nursing who wish to provide educational experiences, conduct research, and create realistic videos depicting nursing and health care, to name a few.
The Center consists of 3 large practice labs, four high fidelity simulation rooms with four corresponding debriefing areas, two central control rooms, and a room designated specifically for fully immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences. The practice labs provide the space for our first semester pre-licensure students to learn the basic foundational skills necessary to begin nursing education and space for advanced skills practice for students progressing through the program. Those areas are flexible and can be converted into high fidelity simulation learning spaces such as a nursing unit to facilitate a multiple patient care experience or provider office space for our advanced practice students.
The four high fidelity simulation rooms can be modified to portray hospital rooms, a clinic or provider office, emergency rooms, a home environment, or a site of a disaster. To increase the Center’s functionality, the four debriefing areas can be converted into simulation rooms or provider office space to allow for a total of eight simulation areas when necessary to meet the needs of our advanced practice programs.
The virtual reality room (VR) provides a safe, adequately sized environment for multiple students to participate in their immersive VR experience at the same time as well as pre-briefing and debriefing space. As with all the spaces in the Center, the VR room can be converted into space for simulation experiences or skills practice.