What We Do

The majority of mistakes in medicine are due to human error – not a lack of medical knowledge. 

The Simulation Center staff trains health care professionals to react and respond to high-risk scenarios in a safe and life-like simulated environment. This training provides simulation model health-care curricula that promotes and advances patient safety, teaches competency skills to health care professionals, and provides opportunity for research in health care education.

What is Simulation?

Simulation is a powerful learning tool. Human simulators are remarkably life like: they can talk, cry, breathe, and even bleed. High-fidelity human patient simulators are computer-based manikins that mimic realistic physiologic human states.

The simulation environment is created to imitate a real-life patient care setting with an emphasis on patient safety. Learners gain confidence and experience a variety of patient situations – across the spectrum from normal/usual patient care to emergencies. The simulated experience includes:

1. Simulated experiences that facilitate team communication and real-time responses.
2. Application of theory and therapy skills for health care providers.
3. Review of simulated experience (debriefing) that focuses on the participants learning.

Simulation Process

Individual scenarios are created to meet learner requirements and apply cognitive activities and psychomotor skills necessary for expert patient care.

Learners practice on high-fidelity manikins that respond physiologically to treatment, while actors play the role of patients and families to help them develop communication skills in crisis. Following simulation scenarios, debriefing sessions provide learners with a chance to review their performance on video, while evaluating the effectiveness of their actions during the simulation. Debriefing is one of the most valuable components of simulation.

Benefits of Simulation

1. Teamwork and leadership
   • Transforming a team of experts into an expert team
   • “Rehearsal” of team effectiveness with protocol verification
   • Communication problems identified
2. Critical thinking
3. Decision making
4. Patient safety
   • Preparing for those “first times”
   • Application of textbook theory and physical patients
5. Patient assessment
6. New skills and procedures
   • Not necessary to “wait” for a real encounter but can occur anytime in a simulated patient
7. Practice of rare emergency treatment skills
8. Competency-based assessment skills
   • Allows learners to progress at their own pace
9. Debriefing enhances maintenance of skills learned in simulation

Patient safety is the most compelling reasons to embrace simulation into healthcare training and here are some of the reasons why…