Three Paramedic Science students at Keele have reached the final of a competition to design the best simulation scenarios for healthcare students.

Final year students Shaun Daley, Mitchell Glover and Emily Brayford will present their simulation at the ASPiH 2024 inaugural Student-Sim Stars competition in Edinburgh next week, alongside finalists from Aston University, the University of Liverpool and Wrexham University.

Simulations are heavily used in many of Keele's courses, with simulation-based education enabling students to experience a scenario in a safer environment than in real life and providing an opportunity to transfer theory to practice. The simulations are designed to provide comprehensive, hands-on experience, preparing students for a wide range of real-world situations, including trauma response, critical care and care and compassion.

Shaun said: "Simulation-based education has been a key part of our curriculum, and we all agree that Keele do simulation really well. When the Student-Sim Stars competition became available and we all separately looked at the entry criteria, we all had broadly the same idea.

"The criteria are based heavily on Equality and Diversity Indicators, both in terms of the content of the simulation as well as how we would facilitate it. All three of us are particularly passionate about patients with learning disabilities, so our collective experience and passion led us to devise a simulation surrounding a patient with learning disabilities suffering a trauma.

"Based on our own research and the literature, we know that patients with learning disabilities are often misdiagnosed in both pre-hospital and secondary care environments, so our simulation is basically around getting the clinician in the scenario to deliver genuine patient-centred care, treating the patient holistically and with respect, making relevant adjustments to their 'usual' clinical assessments and skills - and of course correctly identifying the injury."