The innovative Health Sciences Simulation Center (HSSC) enables Samuel Merritt College to adopt simulation learning throughout its health professional programs. The College anticipates that the simulation learning environment will be used in any number of applications and educational practices across the programs in nursing, physician assistant, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and podiatric medicine curricula.
Simulation and the Goal of Improved Patient Safety
The focus on patient safety in recent years has created the need for creative and effective learning strategies in health professional education that promotes a culture of safety and human error reduction. Simulation-based learning offers many opportunities to accomplish this goal. At a basic level, simulation provides a safe learning environment in which novices can obtain skills training, therefore real patients are not involved or at risk.
Simulation and the Learning Environment
Simulation promotes the integrated and reflective learning that contributes to the development of qualities in healthcare practitioners resulting in high clinical performance: leadership, critical thinking, sound judgment, and effective interpersonal communication. Samuel Merritt College is committed to simulation-based education because of the power of simulation to improve the quality and safety of patient care provided by SMC graduates joining the healthcare workforce.
At more advanced levels of simulation, the reproduction of patient care scenarios enables students to engage in training for emergencies. Students learn and practice the essential non-technical skills of teamwork, task management, situation awareness, and decision-making. Importantly, during post-simulation debriefing sessions, students observe recorded performance and reflect on the quality and effectivess of actions.
Features and Benefits
The Health Sciences Simulation Center is designed with four large teaching and learning areas, including two simulation suites. Each simulation suite is comprised of a simulation action room, control room, conference/debriefing room, and a storage area. Human patient simulators (HPS) are life-like manikins integrated with computer software that enable replication of normal and abnormal physiological responses to events and/or therapeutic interventions (e.g., drug administration). The center currently houses 4 SimMan® and 2 SimBaby® simulators produced by Laerdal®.
A unique feature of the Center is its digital audio-video system and performance assessment software provided by Education Management Solutions, Inc. (EMS) that is integrated with the human patient simulators. The technologies and software applications work in tandem to record the student/patient simulation sessions, enabling College faculty to evaluate the performance of the students. It is the EMS software that enables the immediate review of patient care scenarios during debriefing sessions, a critical component of simulation training.
All of the areas have distance learning capability, via the Tandberg® videoconferencing system. The EMS application is Web-based so faculty and students can evaluate simulation scenario experiences remotely from any location at any time.