Supporting Simulated Practice in Nursing with MyProgress
- Tess
- Jul 29
- 3 min read
Simulated practice learning (SPL) plays a vital role in nursing education, helping pre-registration nursing students develop safe, effective, and confident clinical skills. In the UK, the Nursing & Midwifery Council (NMC) recognises the value of SPL, when it adheres to key principles, it can count for up to 600 of the 2,300 required practice hours.
NMC standards emphasise that SPL must be:
Contextualised and supervised, reflecting real-world practice with patients.
Aligned with NMC practice and assessment standards, ensuring every simulated activity supports authentic competency development.
Designed to allow practice, feedback, repetition, evaluation, and reflection.
Educational institutions that adopt SPL well provide rich learning experiences. Evaluations across 19 UK institutions show that SPL:
Fosters confidence and competence in realistic but safe environments.
Helps standardise student exposure to varied clinical proficiencies.
Is increasingly seen as an essential component of nursing training.
How MyProgress Enhances Simulated Practice
The MyProgress ePortfolio is uniquely positioned to support SPL in nursing programmes, assisting institutions with ensuring they fully meet NMC standards and empowering both students and educators with:
Proficiency Mapping
MyProgress can map simulated tasks and assessments directly to:
NMC proficiencies.
Programme-level outcomes.
Specific simulated skills (e.g., infection control, patient communication, or emergency response).
This allows staff and students to track how simulated practice contributes toward overall competency achievement.
Structured Assessment
MyProgress allows educators to create custom assessment forms that align with NMC standards or institutional competencies and evaluate student performance during simulations using structured digital tools, mimicking real clinical assessment processes. Supervisors can provide immediate grading and feedback post-simulation.
Evidence Capture
Students record simulations through photos, videos, and documents from simulation labs. Students write reflections on their simulated experiences, linking them to specific competencies or learning outcomes. Student self-assessments and narratives demonstrate critical thinking and professional judgement and enable full documentation of every learning moment.
Reflection & Feedback
Integrated tools allow students to reflect on their performance. Educators and peers can comment and offer feedback, supporting the NMC’s emphasis on reflection. Facilitators of simulation sessions can provide immediate, formative feedback and sign off completed simulations just as they would clinical experiences, maintaining parity between learning environments.
Tracking Practice Hours
Log SPL hours and make them visible alongside clinical placements. Combined view ensures compliance with the 600‑hour cap. Students can log simulated practice hours just like clinical placement hours, creating a centralised, auditable record of all learning, including time spent in simulation labs. This also provides clarity for programme teams when demonstrating compliance with training requirements.
Offline Functionality
Capture evidence during simulation labs, even without connectivity, and sync later for seamless record-keeping.
Bringing NMC Standards to Life
In practice, MyProgress enables workflows like this:
Before the session, educators assign simulation scenarios (e.g. ALTE mannequin resuscitation), mapped to specific NMC proficiencies.
During the session, supervisors assess live performance using custom digital forms.
Afterwards, students upload their evidence, add reflections and self-assessment narratives.
All stakeholders (practice assessors, faculty) review and provide formative feedback, supporting growth and demonstrating compliance with NMC's student supervision standards.
Hours and competencies are tracked transparently, ready for audit or to support programme evaluations.
MyProgress is a strategic fit as it aligns with NMC priorities for high-quality, supervised, and reflective SPL. It reduces administrative burden by collating assessments, reflections, and hours in one platform, and supports evidence-based improvements, with built-in analytics for programme leaders to evaluate SPL effectiveness. MyProgress promotes consistency, ensuring all students experience and document rich, contextualised simulations, a key NMC requirement.
In Summary
MyProgress enables nursing programmes to:
Deliver SPL in line with the NMC’s standards for contextualisation, feedback, and competency mapping.
Maximise up to 600 SPL hours, safely and transparently.
Enhance student confidence and readiness, through supported reflection and structured feedback.
By integrating MyProgress, nursing education institutions ensure simulated practice isn't just an add-on, it becomes a powerful, standards-aligned pillar of their teaching model.
If you would like to talk to us about how MyProgress could support simulated practice at your institution, please contact us.
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