Pediatric Healthcare Training by Simulation and Technology
There’s a growing shortage of pediatricians in the U.S. In the 2024 Match, only 92% of pediatric residency positions were filled—down from 97% in 2023. That’s a 5% drop in just one year, which is significant for a specialty that typically fills nearly all its spots.
Today, fewer residents choose pediatrics, which puts pressure on an already stretched system. It’s more important than ever to provide better pediatric healthcare training to the next generation.
In this article, we’ll discuss what makes pediatric training different from adult medicine and share how VR pediatric training is expanding access and helping close critical knowledge gaps.
What Is Pediatric Healthcare Training?
Pediatric healthcare training prepares medical professionals to care for infants, children, and adolescents. It covers medical knowledge, clinical skills, communication, and professionalism for the pediatric population.
Over time, national organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American Board of Pediatrics (ABP) have worked on the development to modernize this training. The focus is no longer just on acute care and disease management. Updated curricula now include preventive care, adolescent medicine, behavioral health, and the social health determinants affecting children and teens.
As of the mid-2010s, there were 218 accredited pediatric residency programs in the U.S. and 16 in Canada. Many of these programs also offer fellowships in pediatric subspecialties like cardiology, neonatology, and critical care.
Types of Pediatric Learning Solutions
Modern pediatric healthcare training goes far beyond textbooks and lectures. Here are the main types of pediatric learning solutions used in training programs:
Clinical Rotations
Clinical rotations remain the most traditional and widely used method of pediatric healthcare training today. Medical students spend time in hospitals, clinics, and emergency departments, working alongside experienced pediatricians to care for real patients.
Trainees learn to take pediatric histories, perform physical exams, and make clinical decisions under supervision.
While clinical rotations are essential, they have limitations. Patient encounters can be unpredictable. Some trainees may not see rare or high-risk cases during their rotations. Others may have limited hands-on opportunities if the unit is too busy or the patient load is low. There’s also the pressure of learning while making sure of patient safety.
High-Fidelity Simulation
High-fidelity simulation (HFS) is one of the most powerful tools in pediatric healthcare training today. These simulations use advanced pediatric manikins that blink, breathe, speak, and respond to clinical interventions.
The most sophisticated pediatric simulators can show pulses, heart and lung sounds, and cyanosis and even react to medications or procedures. Research shows that pediatric nursing students who participate in high-fidelity simulation report greater self-confidence and higher satisfaction with their clinical skills.
Online Pediatric Training
Online pediatric training brings flexibility and accessibility to clinical education. It allows students, residents, and practicing clinicians to build pediatric knowledge anytime, anywhere.
This type of training typically includes recorded video lectures, interactive modules, discussion forums, and online quizzes. While it doesn’t replace hands-on practice, it’s a valuable way to review concepts, test knowledge, and prepare for clinical experiences.
Standardized Patients
Standardized patients are trained actors who consistently simulate real medical conditions. They help medical trainees practice clinical skills like history taking, physical exams, and communication.
While standardized patients are widely used in adult healthcare training, they’re more limited in pediatrics. That’s because it’s difficult to find child actors who can reliably portray a range of symptoms and stay emotionally regulated during simulations. Child SPs may also be unable to repeat scenarios the same way for every learner.
There are also ethical and logistical concerns. Long sessions or emotionally intense scenarios may not be appropriate for children.
Pediatric Virtual Reality Training
Pediatric virtual reality (VR) training is the most advanced method available in medical education today. It uses fully immersive 3D environments where learners can interact with lifelike pediatric patients.
What makes VR especially valuable for pediatrics is its ability to recreate complex, high-pressure situations involving children. These are often rare in clinical rotations and hard to replicate with manikins. In VR, trainees can encounter everything from respiratory distress in a toddler to vaccine counseling with a hesitant parent.
Benefits of pediatric VR training include:
- Exposure to rare or high-risk pediatric cases
- Safe, repeatable practice for procedures and clinical decision-making
- Realistic child avatars that simulate emotional and behavioral responses
- Immediate feedback and performance tracking
- Improved confidence in handling emergencies and difficult conversations
- Flexibility to train anytime, without physical equipment or live patients
Lumeto is a leading provider of pediatric healthcare training using immersive virtual reality. Its AI-powered characters replicate authentic emotions and communication. Here’s a video from Lumeto’s library:
Lumeto offers different VR scenarios for pediatric medical education, such as:
- Comprehensive age-appropriate assessments
- Recognizing and managing dehydration
- Managing and treating pediatric seizures (IPE)
- Management of asthma and respiratory distress
- De-escalating managing caregiver in emergency
- Family member effective care education
- Recognizing abuse and mitigating
Importance of Pediatric Medical Education
Effective pediatric training reduces medical errors and builds long-term trust between families and healthcare systems. Here’s why pediatric medical education is important for healthcare trainers and families:
Distinct Anatomical and Physiological Characteristics
Children are not small adults. Their bodies function differently, and those differences matter in clinical care.
Pediatric patients have unique anatomical and physiological traits that require specialized approaches. For instance, a child’s tongue is proportionally larger than their oropharynx. This increases the risk of airway obstruction, especially during respiratory distress or sedation.
Age-Appropriate Communication
Pediatric providers often have two patients in the room—the child and the parent. Learning to communicate on two levels (explaining things to parents clearly while also talking in kid-friendly terms to the child) is a skill that takes time.
Research shows that communication in pediatrics directly impacts patient satisfaction and treatment adherence.
Emergency Care for Kids
More than 7 million children in the U.S. are treated in emergency departments every year. Pediatric emergencies can be fast-moving, high-stress situations that require quick thinking and specialized skills.
Studies from the National Pediatric Readiness Project show just how critical that training is. Emergency departments that score 88 or higher on the pediatric readiness scale can reduce the risk of death by up to 76% for seriously ill children and 60% for injured children. Researchers estimate that if every ED met this standard, we could prevent over 2,100 pediatric deaths yearly.
Mental and Behavioral Health
Roughly 1 in 5 adolescents will face a mental health issue in any given year. Despite that, nearly 70% of young people with mental health problems don’t get the right support early enough. That gap can lead to long-term challenges in school, relationship, and physical health.
Pediatric healthcare training must prepare providers to recognize and respond to early signs of mental and behavioral health concerns. Training programs can build competency in addressing conditions such as:
- Anxiety disorders
- Depression
- ADHD
- Autism spectrum disorder
- Conduct disorder
- Eating disorders
- PTSD
- Suicidal ideation
- Substance use
- Mood disorders
There’s a growing mental health crisis among children and adolescents—and not enough trained professionals to meet the need.
Vaccine Education and Delivery
Healthcare providers today face increasing vaccine hesitancy and misinformation—especially from parents concerned about safety or side effects. Clinicians must be skilled in safely administering vaccines and communicating their importance clearly and empathetically.
Common Gaps in Pediatric Training Programs
Below are some of the most common challenges that hold back training outcomes in pediatrics today:
Limited Exposure to Pediatrics in Clinical Rotations
Patient availability can vary based on season, location, hospital type, and day-to-day unit activity. Thus, it is difficult to guarantee that every trainee sees the full range of pediatric conditions.
A study from an Australian medical school highlighted how uneven this exposure can be. While nearly all students encountered common issues like fever and respiratory distress, fewer than 30% saw cases involving abdominal or groin masses, ingestions, or other less frequent but critical conditions.
Another problem is that these clinical encounters are often observational. Research shows that students frequently watch rather than participate.
High-fidelity simulation and pediatric virtual reality training help transform this passive observation into active learning, giving trainees consistent hands-on practice they might otherwise miss.
Here’s a video of NYU students going through a VR scenario from Lumeto’s training library:
High Cost and Complexity of Simulation Equipment
High-fidelity pediatric mannequins can range from $10,000 to over $100,000, depending on features like responsiveness, software integration, and realism. Programs also need to invest in:
- Realistic hospital environments,
- Medical supplies,
- Monitoring equipment,
- Faculty time required to run and debrief each session.
Virtual reality simulation offers a scalable, cost-effective solution. Instead of building a physical space, learners can enter a fully immersive pediatric setting using a VR headset. They can practice procedures, interact with AI-driven pediatric patients, and receive real-time feedback.
Here’s a video example from Lumeto’s scenario library that shows what a pediatric room looks like inside their virtual environment:
Standardized Patients Not Feasible
Standardized patients (SPs) are widely used in adult medical training but are much harder to implement in pediatrics. Younger children may struggle to repeat scenarios reliably or handle emotionally intense cases. It’s not practical or appropriate to expect children to portray certain symptoms or medical emergencies.
Virtual reality simulation offers a practical alternative. With AI-powered child avatars, trainees can interact with pediatric patients of different ages, backgrounds, and emotional states.
Difficult to Recreate Stress of Pediatric Emergencies
Pediatric emergencies are emotionally intense and clinically complex. Providers simultaneously manage parents’ or guardians’ fears, questions, and reactions. This emotional weight takes a toll. Over 60% of pediatricians report experiencing at least one dimension of burnout, and around 77.8% of pediatric nurses show signs of moderate to severe secondary traumatic stress.
Traditional training methods rarely capture this emotional pressure. Simulations may focus on clinical steps but overlook the real-life tension of a distressed parent or an uncooperative child.
Platforms like Lumeto now include AI-powered pediatric patients and realistic parent or guardian characters. These virtual adults can display fear, panic, confusion, or assertiveness. They can mirror the dynamics clinicians face during real emergencies. Trainees must respond to medical and emotional cues, manage the room, explain care plans, and make fast decisions under pressure.
Limited Practice for Complex Communication
Communication in pediatrics is rarely straightforward. Providers must explain complex medical information in terms a child can understand.
Despite its importance, structured practice for these kinds of conversations is limited. Clinical rotations often don’t offer enough time or variety. Many communication scenarios are unpredictable and hard to replicate. And most simulations focus on technical skills, not on the nuance of family-centered dialogue.
VR training platforms address this gap with conversational AI-powered virtual patients. For example, a trainer can program a virtual parent to:
- Calmly ask about treatment risks
- Argue about a vaccine
- Panic during a critical emergency
- Refuse to consent to a procedure
What sets Lumeto apart is that trainers can customize the AI’s responses on the back end, as shown in the video below:
Few Opportunities to Train for Bias and Diversity at the Bedside
Children come from diverse cultural, racial, socioeconomic, and family backgrounds. But, in most clinical settings, trainees have limited opportunities to build skills in bias recognition and inclusive communication.
Virtual reality platforms are starting to close this gap. Trainers can select or design patient scenarios featuring families from a range of backgrounds—different ethnicities, languages, family structures, gender identities, and socioeconomic situations.
Learners can interact with AI-driven patients and caregivers who challenge assumptions and push back on recommendations.
Frequently Asked Questions About Pediatric Healthcare Training
Do non-physician providers also receive pediatric training?
Yes. Nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and paramedics can receive pediatric-specific training as part of their education or through continuing education programs.
Is pediatric training the same worldwide?
No. Training standards vary by country, though many follow guidelines set by national boards or global organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO) or the International Pediatric Association (IPA).
What equipment is needed for VR training?
Most programs use a VR headset (like Meta Quest or HTC Vive), a compatible computer or cloud-based platform, and access to training software.
Is VR training suitable for all learners?
Yes. It’s used by medical students, residents, nurses, and allied health professionals as part of ongoing training and continuing education. VR is especially helpful for learners who benefit from hands-on, experiential learning.