A course is accepted against a checklist, so we build it from the checklistIn September 2026 the UK Nursing and Midwifery Council added new stations to its clinical skills examination and published updated marking criteria that apply from 26 October. A skills course is marked against tables like these, row by row, which is why the group builds each procedure course from its checklist, one row to one frame, and checks the match by script.
Better a gap than a guess: reading a lab printout honestlyThe UK regulator’s AI commission says direct-to-consumer medical devices cannot lean on a clinician for risk control. For a record built from uploaded lab printouts, that means marking what could not be read instead of filling it in.- More practice, no significant diagnostic advantage over control: a leaderboard trialA randomised trial published on 17 September 2026 in Clinical and Experimental Dermatology found that adding a daily leaderboard to a dermatology diagnosis training platform made medical students train 3.3 times as many cases, with no significant difference in diagnostic skill improvement.
Triple science by postcode: what science teachers say is missingThe Royal Society of Chemistry’s Science Teaching Survey 2026, published on 8 September, found that teachers in schools in England with a higher proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals are far less likely to expect their school to offer all three sciences. Teachers cite a lack of science teachers, and more than half of respondents in mainstream schools in England say practical lessons are underfunded.- The address printed on a certificateA Florida nursing-school owner pleaded guilty in June 2026 in a scheme that, evidence at trial showed, issued 2,956 fake nursing diplomas. Certificates from the course library now part of VARGATES Medical carry a QR code to a public page where anyone can check who holds one and what it certifies.
- Who can see this case? The question a shared learning platform must answer firstMonths after the Canvas breach, Instructure is returning to each university its own packet of the files taken from it. For a medical faculty choosing a simulation platform, the first question is which accounts can reach its cases and its students’ progress — here is how VARGATES Medical answers it.
- Complement or competitor: what a national simulation tender says about virtual patientsNHS Supply Chain has opened tenders for a Medical Simulation and Technologies Framework that puts manikins, task trainers and immersive virtual clinical environments into separate lots, scored differently. For a distributor who already carries simulation equipment, it shows where a virtual-patient simulator sits: beside the equipment, in its own line of the specification.
