About Simulation

A range of easily accessible learning opportunities:
Simulation offers scheduled, valuable learning experiences that are difficult to obtain in real life. Learners address hands-on and thinking skills, including knowledge-in-action, procedures, decision-making, and effective communication. Critical teamwork behaviors such as managing high workload, trapping errors, and coordinating under stress can be taught and practiced. Training runs the gamut from preventive care to invasive surgery. Because any clinical situation can be portrayed at will, these learning opportunities can be scheduled at convenient times and locations and repeated as often as necessary.

The freedom to make mistakes and to learn from them: Working in a simulated environment allows learners to make mistakes without the need for intervention by experts to stop patient harm. By seeing the outcome of their mistakes, learners gain powerful insight into the consequences of their actions and the need to “get it right”.

The learning experience can be customized:  Simulation can accommodate a range of learners from novices to experts. Beginners can gain confidence and “muscle memory” for tasks that then allow them to focus on the more demanding parts of care. Experts can better master the continuously growing array of new technologies from minimally invasive surgery and catheter-based therapies to robotics without putting the first groups of patients at undue risk. Some complex procedures and rare diseases simply do not present enough opportunities for practice, even to established clinicians. Examples include treating a severe allergic reaction or heart attack in an outpatient clinic setting, or handling a case of malignant hyperthermia in the operating room. This is a gap that simulation training methods can help fill.

Detailed feedback and evaluation: Real events and the pace of actual healthcare operations do not allow for the best review and learning about why things took place, or how to improve performance. Controlled simulations can be immediately followed by videotape-supported debriefings or after-action reviews that richly detail what happened. Advanced surgical and task simulators gather much data about what the learner is actually doing. These performance maps and logs provide a solid and necessary feedback mechanism to learners and help instructors target necessary improvements.