Written by Rebecca Budde, SIU School of Medicine
While the days of studying from a book or taking notes during a lecture are not extinct, modern medical education encompasses many new avenues of learning. With the recent opening of the Memorial Center for Learning and Innovation, educators and learners (medical students, residents, nurses, technicians, etc.) are greatly benefitting from simulated events.
Medical simulations have the potential to better health care delivery and improve patient safety for patients in our area. “The MCLI allows us to take the skills we use to provide care for patients, practice them, streamline the process and make care more efficient and at a higher level for when it really matters – when we’re taking care of an actual patient,” says SIU emergency medicine physician Dr. Christopher McDowell.
Simulations can address the entire spectrum of care for the best learning experience for all the teams. Planners can create any scenario needed to train or test protocols to treat specific diagnoses. In most simulations, the majority of participants have no knowledge of the events that will unfold. Health care teams treat the patient, who is either a trained actor or a simulated mannequin, as they would in real life.
“This is a paradigm shift in how we make health care safer and better: We can now evaluate skills and fix errors prospectively, before they affect a real patient,” Dr. Sapan Desai says.
Dr. Desai recently spearheaded a groundbreaking simulation at the MCLI, in which a patient collapsed in the faux living room. He called 911 and sent a series of events in motion that led to the diagnosis and treatment of a normally fatal situation. Read more here.
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