Virtual interactive practice: utilizing healthcare information systems to contextualize the skills associated with clinical decision making within nurse education.

This paper reports on a Virtual Interactive Practice (VIP) project that has the potential to revolutionise the educational delivery and learning of clinical skills complementing "real" practice. The focus is currently on nurse learning but the principles could equally be applied to multi and inter-professional learning and clinical decision-making. This project represents a new model to enhance clinical skill acquisition and clinical reasoning using a structured competency base. Integral to this is a strong partnership between education and practice utilising "real" live and recorded anonymised patient data from a critical care clinical information system (CIS) within a large district general hospital to structure scenarios fostering problem-based learning. This educational practice interface enables the synthesis of clinical data using virtual technology and sophisticated scenario-based simulation within a skills laboratory. The aim is to enhance the more ad hoc system of learning within conventional practice placements. Early findings suggest that VIP enhances practice providing a safe but challenging learning experience with the benefit of instant performance feedback to students.