Education & Skills 
Health 
Policy Connect, alongside the Higher Education Commission and the All-Party Parliamentary Health Group (APHG), recently launched Trained for Tomorrow, a report exploring the challenges facing the healthcare education pipeline. Simulation-based learning recreates clinical scenarios away from the bedside. It lets students and staff practise, make mistakes, and learn without risk to patients. The theme ran throughout the inquiry, and our report recommends that regulators formally recognise simulation as a valued, quality-assured complement to clinical placement hours.
At our launch event, the University of Greenwich brought a live showcase from its Learning and Simulation Centre (GLASC). This included Gwen, a bespoke Down syndrome simulation manikin built to support inclusive, person-centred care training, and Patient Ready, which uses photorealistic AI patient avatars for clinical assessment and communication practice, alongside an electronic patient record platform and immersive learning experiences developed with Metaverse Learning.
In August, I spoke to Professor Sharon Weldon, Professor of Healthcare Simulation and Workforce Development at Greenwich and President of the Association for Simulated Practice in Healthcare (ASPiH), about her path into simulation, what the inquiry meant to her, and where she thinks the field is heading next.
Getting into simulation
Sharon’s route into healthcare began with a serious illness as a teenager. A tumour was misdiagnosed and later removed, and a retained surgical swab caused a severe infection that put her arm at risk a second time, leading to two years in and out of hospital. She remembers receiving excellent care from the healthcare professionals and staff around her, but it was the nurses who provided the emotional support she needed during the moments when she felt most scared, lonely and isolated. That experience shaped her decision to train as a nurse herself.
“I’m from Somerset, but part of my treatment could only be provided in London, so I spent a lot of time there away from my family and friends. It could be quite lonely and isolating, and at times frightening. The nurses were a constant presence and provided a lot of the emotional support I needed during that time.”
She moved through several clinical roles, including operating theatres and infectious disease nursing, before frustration at how slowly the system changed pushed her toward research. That path led to Imperial College London, where a project studying communication in operating theatres drew directly on her own experiences, and where she went on to complete a PhD in simulation.
“I got frustrated because I started to see opportunities, simple changes in the system that would benefit both the patients and staff, but it was impossible to get anyone to want to change anything… Someone said to me after a while, if you want to make change in healthcare, get into research.”
There has traditionally been no defined career path into simulation, she said, and most people in the field found their way in much as she did. That mirrors a gap our report identifies more broadly: that awareness of the full range of healthcare careers remains patchy, which is part of why we recommended a sustained national careers campaign covering the full breadth of roles available.
“When I did my PhD, people were always saying, why would you do a PhD in simulation? There’s no career pathway. And they were right. But I was curious, and I knew there was something about this that was for the future, and where real transformation could occur.”
She later joined Greenwich, where new leadership investment in simulation gave her the platform to build the field from the ground up as Professor of Healthcare Simulation and Workforce Development. Alongside this, she is President of ASPiH, a multidisciplinary community of healthcare professionals, academics, technicians and industry partners. Among its achievements are nationally and internationally recognised Standards for simulated practice and a Professional Development Framework designed to support quality and workforce development across the simulation community. Both were developed collaboratively with NHS England, Health Education and Improvement Wales, NHS Education for Scotland, the Northern Ireland Medical and Dental Training Agency, the National Simulation Office in Ireland, and the wider national and international simulation community. ASPiH also hosts an annual conference now drawing over a thousand attendees and supports the continued development of simulation through specialist interest groups and its official international scholarly journal.
The value of simulation
Across the inquiry, we heard about simulation’s value for enhancing competence and supporting confidence and agency. It supports an inclusive experience, allowing students to build confidence before entering complex clinical settings, which is particularly valuable for students with disabilities or those who experience anxiety in early practice exposure. Scenarios can be replicated consistently, unusual cases deliberately introduced, future care re-imagined, and mistakes made and learned from without consequences for patients.
For Sharon, however, the policy opportunity goes beyond using simulation to supplement clinical placement capacity. She argues that simulation should increasingly be understood as part of the infrastructure of healthcare: connecting education with practice, bringing professions together, testing innovations before they reach patients, and enabling organisations to learn and adapt.
The benefit Sharon particularly emphasised in our conversation was simulation’s role in developing interprofessional learning. She described how simulation naturally brings different professions into the same room, often for the first time, surfacing assumptions about how other roles work and building a kind of trust that formal teaching rarely manages on its own.
“I’m fascinated by simulation, the way it brings people together, it allows shared curiosity, understanding, and helps us think differently. We need to be adaptable in this current climate, and simulation gives us that safety and freedom to try new things.”
This speaks directly to what our inquiry heard about interprofessional learning. Many students told us they feel unprepared for integrated, team-based care despite it being an explicit regulatory requirement, with training across professions still far more siloed in practice than policy assumes.
Sharon was equally clear about the importance of preserving playfulness and curiosity within simulation, comparing it to the licence children have to try out unfamiliar roles through play. This lines up with a point we made throughout Trained for Tomorrow, that training should not just be made possible but genuinely enjoyable, a theme that runs through our recommendations on CPD access and flexible delivery.
“Simulation gives us permission to play, and there is something powerful about that. It creates a safe space to be curious, try things out, make mistakes and imagine different possibilities before we have to do them for real.”
She also pointed to simulation’s potential to ease the shortage of clinical educators, letting practitioners re-engage with current practice without leaving their substantive roles. This speaks to a constraint our report identifies directly. Pay differentials and unclear routes into education roles discourage practitioners from teaching, even as the profession badly needs them to. Our report subsequently recommended the development of a national strategy to increase healthcare educator capacity across all professions, with simulation offering one practical route into the transition pathways that the recommendation calls for.
“You have educationalists who haven’t been in practice for a long time but are teaching the future workforce. Simulation offers a powerful way of bridging that gap. Staff say they feel reinvigorated in their practice through simulation because it gives them an opportunity to experience contemporary practice again.”
The challenges facing simulation
Sharon described ASPiH’s approach to quality and standards as deliberately community-led: providing trusted frameworks while preserving the professional judgement, creativity and innovation that simulation requires. She pointed to the Nursing and Midwifery Council’s approach to simulated practice learning hours as an example done well. Rather than defining simulation precisely, the NMC set parameters around reflection and contextulisation, trusting providers to apply judgement, a genuine departure in a profession used to far more prescriptive rules.
“We want to make sure we’re still powered by the community, that we’re not telling people how to do things. Simulation is not set in stone, and it needs to come from the creativity of the people working in it too – otherwise we will stifle the innovation that simulation naturally enables.”
She also raised the difficulty of proving simulation’s impact through conventional measures. Confidence surveys and skills checklists capture something, but not the slower shifts in culture, psychological safety, and trust that she believes matter most, and which only become visible over a longer period of sustained investment.
“I think the outcomes are massive, and our problem is measuring and recognising it. We often look at whether someone has increased confidence, and that’s wonderful, but when you’re thinking about the longer term impacts, like building empathy, adaptability, changes in culture, enabling people to speak up… that’s really hard to capture but far more consequential.”
Her clearest concern was fragmentation. If every regulator develops its own simulation standards independently, she said, healthcare risks losing what makes simulation valuable in the first place: its capacity to bring different professions together. This sits close to two of our own recommendations, that regulators develop a shared framework for curriculum innovation explicitly encompassing simulation, and that formal recognition be extended profession by profession, building on existing cross-professional infrastructure, including ASPiH’s Standards and Professional Development Framework, rather than creating parallel profession-specific systems from scratch.
“One of the biggest strengths of simulation is the opportunity for interprofessional working together. But my worry is if all the regulators go off and do their own individual standards, it could just fragment us further. That’s why I was so glad to see the recommendation in the Policy Connect report about regulators working together in a shared framework.”
Where simulation goes next
Looking ahead, Sharon wants simulation embedded throughout healthcare training and practice, not treated as an occasional add-on. At Greenwich, sequential simulation work that began with healthcare students following a patient’s journey has already expanded into the university’s law school and involved policing partners, tracking a case across an entire system rather than a single profession’s part in it.
“Simulation is even expanding within Greenwich. We started off with healthcare professionals following a patient journey, then expanded into our school of law, and then the police came in. It just keeps growing as we see the interconnected value more clearly.”
Sharon also argues that simulation’s value should not stop at educating the workforce. Increasingly, it can be used to test healthcare systems themselves – identifying safety risks, exploring new pathways and technologies before implementation, and bringing staff and patients together to understand how services could work differently. In this sense, simulation can become a method for organisational learning, improvement and transformation, rather than simply a method for education and training.
“We need to stop asking only what people learn from simulation and start asking what organisations learn from it. We can use simulation not just to prepare people for the system we have, but to test, question and redesign the system itself.”
She is particularly interested in what simulation combined with AI could offer, not simply automating tasks healthcare professionals already do, but creating a continuous loop between practice and training, where developments in care feed directly back into how the next generation is taught. That, she said, also means learning from students, who often understand emerging tools better than those teaching them. This is a question Policy Connect is exploring more widely through a new inquiry into AI and healthcare, examining how a cross-government roadmap can enable the use of AI in the NHS, alongside the challenges of public trust, data sharing, ethics, and regulation that come with it, against a stated ambition for fully AI-enabled hospitals within the decade.
“The way I see things going forward, we would be using simulation and technology to have a continuous learning loop, where we’re using it to teach the future workforce but at the same time using our future workforce to help reimagine the future of health and care. Because the reality is, we can’t keep repeating and teaching what worked in the past, because the world is changing rapidly and that won’t work for us.”
For Sharon, the future of simulation depends on this kind of connected infrastructure. Regulators, educators, practitioners and technology will keep evolving separately unless something connects them deliberately, and simulation, by its nature, already does much of that work. Whether it is bringing professions into the same room, bridging practice and education, or testing new tools like AI before they reach patients, its value lies less in any single outcome than in its capacity to hold a fragmented system together. Getting the policy architecture to match that ambition, she argued, is the change that matters most.
You can read the full Trained for Tomorrow report here, and find out more about by contacting Rhiannon Tuckett-Jones (rhiannon.tuckett-jones@policyconnect.org.uk).
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