Virtuelle Patienten: Wie werden sie aus Sicht von Medizinstudierenden am besten eingesetzt?

“Virtual Patients” (VPs) enable medical students to simulate a patient encounter before their first real patient contact. Later they can also be used to assess and train students’ abilities to recognize and treat selected diseases. This is especially valuable as medical schools are normally linked to maximum medical care hospitals with increasing difficulties to present patients with less serious medical conditions to their students. Five different approaches were taken to find out which is the best way to use VPs in medical education. From the student’s points of view best results can be achieved in the majority of cases when students worked in groups of two up to about ten.