Abstract:

Nursing students’ education begins in the classroom prior to clinical training. The use of standardized patient during the education process is an alternative to traditional teaching methods. By enhancing the interaction between classroom and clinics, standardized patients in nursing education may contribute to the learning process by providing a realistic clinical learning experience in the classroom prior to actual clinical education. This systematic review was intended to investigate the studies that have evaluated the outcomes of standardized patient use in nursing education. A literature review was conducted by searching the databases of “CINAHL Plus”, “Medline”, “Health Source: Nurse/Academic Edition ( EBSCO host)”, “Sciences Direct“ and “Google Scholar” through 573 articles. Articles were selected from a pile of full text studies that were written in Turkish or English, released in the last decade (January, 2015 – April, 2015) and found by entering the keywords of “simulated patients”, “standardized patients”, “nursing education”, “simulated patients in nursing” and “standardized patients in nursing”. Of these studies, 22 matching the research criteria were included in this study. A systematic review was carried out according to the recommendations of the Cochrane Collaboration. The selected studies were divided into two groups of which one group evaluated the cognitive abilities and the other evaluated the psychomotor skills of the students. Selected articles were assigned to be used in experimental, quasi-experimental, descriptive and mixed research designs. In 7 of the studies, it has been determined that training with a standardized patient helps students to acquire communication skills. In addition, 7 of the studies reported an increase in students’ satisfaction, self-efficacy, and self-confidence levels after training with a standardized patient. Students evaluated the use of standardized patient in nursing education as a beneficial and positive experience as it provides a realistic case presentation. Although training with standardized patients in nursing education can be expensive and time consuming, it is considered an effective teaching method that contributes to students’ satisfaction, self-efficacy and self-confidence, and improves their communication and motor skills.

Keywords: