SimVS Nurse Station vs. DIY Multi-Patient Scenarios

What building your own really costs

Building your own multi-patient simulation is two jobs. The first is content: writing each scenario, its charts and orders, how each patient evolves, and the cues students must catch, then piloting and revising it. SimVS estimates a comparable library is “hundreds of hours of build time.” The second is the environment: a realistic multi-patient unit, not just one manikin. Prioritization and delegation only get exercised when several patients compete for attention at once, call bells interrupt, and telemetry needs watching. Building that yourself means cobbling together call systems, monitors, and communication tools.

And those hundreds of hours come from people who do not have them. Scenario authoring is not a one-time inconvenience; it is faculty time pulled from teaching, clinical supervision, and the students themselves.

The SimVS Nurse Station covers both jobs. It includes the ready-made curriculum (16 faculty-authored, NCJMM-aligned scenarios that combine into 100+ multi-patient combos) plus the unit infrastructure to run it: call bells, telemetry, an instructor hub, two-way communication, and real-time alerts across up to 20 beds, handing capacity back to a department that has none to spare.

Why “NCJMM-aligned” matters here

The included curriculum is aligned to the NCSBN Clinical Judgment Measurement Model (NCJMM), the framework behind the Next Generation NCLEX. NCJMM describes clinical judgment as six steps: recognize cues, analyze cues, prioritize hypotheses, generate solutions, take action, and evaluate outcomes.

Those steps map directly onto multi-patient work. When a student has to decide which of four patients to see first, weighing each one's acuity as a call bell rings, they're exercising “recognize cues,” “analyze cues,” and “prioritize hypotheses,” all in real time. Because nursing-education faculty wrote the included scenarios against NCJMM, you don't have to reverse-engineer prioritization and delegation into homemade cases.

Prioritization and delegation only get exercised when several patients compete for attention at once. That's the environment, not just the scenario.

Where building your own still makes sense

The DIY route wins on a couple of real things:

• No platform purchase. If capital budget is the hard constraint and faculty time is available, paper-based or improvised multi-patient exercises cost nothing up front.
• Faculty development. Authoring scenarios builds genuine expertise in your team.

What the Nurse Station includes

• SimVS Nurse Station. Bedside call bells, a central nurse's-station device, and an instructor tablet in one plug-and-play system, with no wiring or installation.
• Multipatient Curriculum (included, Edition 2026.1). 16 faculty-authored, NCJMM-aligned scenarios that combine into 100+ multi-patient combos, run as 2, 3, or 4 patients at a time, at about 2 hours prep-to-debrief.
• Facilitator binder. A printed guide with an SBAR handoff for each patient and branching transitions where each patient's condition improves or deteriorates based on how the student prioritizes care.
• Instructor control. Send alerts and vitals, view call-bell status, and monitor student responses across up to 20 beds per hub.
• Bedside. Respond to alerts, call a code blue, push-to-talk communication, and toggle between nurse call and vitals.
• Point-of-care devices. A point-of-care tablet that doubles as a glucometer, pulse oximeter, and thermometer, capturing glucose, SpO2, and temperature at the bedside with an easy switch between device types.
• Nurse Station Lab 6 Pack. A full-unit configuration for programs running 6 or more beds.
• No annual fees. Lifetime software updates included, and existing SimVS systems can be upgraded to the Nurse Station.