The NHS Plan (Secretary for Health, 2000) called for partnership and co-operation at all levels to ensure a seamless service of patient centred care. These propositions were spelt out in the NHS workforce strategy (DoH, 2000) which called for education and training which was “genuinely multi-professional” to promote and include:
Teamwork
Partnership and collaboration between professions, between agencies and with patients
Skill mix and flexible working between professions.
Within the United Kingdom the use of simulated patients as a learning and teaching strategy is gaining momentum to not only provide an inter-professional approach to the learning needs of students, to place learning into “context” but also as a means to support life long learning.
This paper discusses the use of simulated patients as a learning and teaching strategy and explores how it develops the students’ communication, interpersonal and problem solving skills that can be transferred from the academic to the clinical areas throughout their professional careers.