Following the Script
The “proper treatment” depends on the parameters of a given scenario, and these are created by Lisa Rivera, the Sim Coordinator, who began teaching at Ketchum after 26 years as a nurse practitioner. She creates a case study with a “script” and the Sim Man follows this script in the voice of a technician, who is observing from a separate room and speaking for the Sim Man through a microphone. Lisa also is the voice students hear when they pick up the phone to order labs, X-rays, meds or consultations. After a long career in health care, she knows just how to simulate all the potential responses to such inquiries if they lack any information.
If the students buy in – and they always do – then a simulation with the Sim Man provides them with an extremely valuable learning opportunity. “The beauty of it,” explains Lisa, “is that our students don’t have many opportunities outside of the Sim Room to work and problem-solve as a team and to be put into a setting where it’s safe for them to make mistakes without hurting anybody. They’re not being judged. Success is not necessarily fixing the condition, it’s about how they have to work together to treat the condition.” This is, of course, one of the major goals of the simulations and essential for the collaborative approach to health care at the core of Ketchum’s mission. “Not only do they benefit from working in teams,” says Erin, “but often one group of students will observe another, and they will then benefit from peer-to-peer evaluation.”
A crucial part of each simulation is the debriefing afterward, when students can process what happened, their feelings about it, and learn from Erin, Lisa and/or other faculty members about what they did and how effective it was.
A Rewarding Activity
And speaking of the collaborative approach to health care education, the Sim Man is used by each of the disciplines at MBKU, including the College of Pharmacy. “We utilized the Sim Room for the first time with our inaugural pharmacy class this past fall,” says Dr. Azita Alipour, Assistant Professor in the College of Pharmacy. “The case involved management of a patient with an inadvertent opioid overdose. Afterward, the students stated that the activity was stressful, challenging, and rewarding, due to the realistic nature of the activity.”
One of the things Lisa and Erin point out is that years ago when they were training in their respective health care disciplines, they had few opportunities to truly practice. When they began to interact with patients for the first time, those patients were real people with real ailments, and the stress was enormous. The Sim Man mitigates this by simulating the stress itself. Dr. Kayvan Moussavi, another Assistant Professor in the College of Pharmacy, also speaks to this advantage. “Because the mannequins are not alive, there is no risk of real-life injury,” he says. “However, patient harm can be simulated if students recommend inappropriate therapy. This creates an added pressure for students to select the most appropriate therapy for the simulated patient, just like there is pressure to select the best therapy for real patients. Ideally, the knowledge and skills developed during these sessions will allow students to provide the safest, most-effective therapy to patients during pharmacy practice experiences.”
The Simulation Lab is another example of MBKU’s innovative approach to collaborative health care education. Students work together and learn together, and over and over again, their “patient” receives high-quality interprofessional health care.
The full Spring 2019 issue is available online. Read Now
