“I want each unit to come up with their top three goals for education and patient safety hazards that they see on their particular ward,” Czekajlo said. “Then we’ll sit down and the Sim Lab staff will help them design the curriculum for that. We’re the experts in the technology. But they are the experts from their ward. So that’s how I see this going. We can take simulators and try a couple different ways of doing it. Instead of just thinking it through we can actually test it.”
Other recent VA simulator acquisitions, including new “birthing simulators,” reflect changing demographics within the U.S. veteran population.
“We have more women vets,” Czekajlo observed. “So that should translate to more birthing simulators and other kinds of gynecological designs moving forward as well.”
U.S. Air Force Maj. Jackie Nord, 119th Medical Group, attends to simulated injuries on a state-of-the-art human patient simulator mannequin during training at the North Dakota Air National Guard Base, Fargo, North Dakota, June 3, 2014. The mannequin was fully capable of simulating normal bodily processes such as breathing and having a heartbeat. The realistic human simulator mannequin is one piece of the training equipment and instruction provided by the Simulation in Motion-North Dakota Program, which is operated by the North Dakota Department of Health and the University of North Dakota, in an effort to provide realistic pre-hospital and emergency care to medical personnel throughout the state. U.S. Air National Guard photo by Senior Master Sgt. David H. Lipp
According to SimLEARN’s Robinson, the next milestone in VHA’s growing embrace of medical simulation will be the opening of a 51,000-square-foot “immersive training facility” at the Orlando location.
“What we’re building here is an immersive training environment with nine clinical exam rooms, an operating room, a catheter lab, three intensive care units that convert to medical/surgical with one converting to a bariatric surgical suite, a trauma room, and a triage room. We’re also going to have things like the back end of an ambulance on casters,” he said.
“There is absolutely no health care that is going to be delivered in this building,” he added. “But it’s going to be representative of any VA clinic on the outpatient side or any VA hospital on the inpatient side. It will provide a level of ‘suspension of disbelief’ to create and maintain an immersive training environment.”
Robinson highlighted a “team” behind the immersive environment that has included architects RLF (Rogers, Lovelock and Fritz), architectural engineers Ellerbe Becket (now AECOM), input from multiple medical training centers, support from VA Office of Construction and Facilities Management, general construction contractor (joint venture) Archer Western/Demaria, and extensive support from the Orlando VA Medical Center.
“Applying simulation-based training in the medical field clearly provides numerous benefits. It provides a safe training environment where no harm can ever come to a patient. You can also target exactly what you want to train on a given day. And we get to teach to a mastery level, where the students can perform a procedure numerous times, just like a military pilot can practice in a simulator for landing on the ship at night. They can learn the muscle memory and all the cognitive skills. They can do it so many times in the simulator that they become proficient at the task. And this is key in health care, where there are numerous procedures that providers might not get to see without the opportunity of simulation.”
Current schedules reflect completion of the new facility around the end of 2015, with the active delivery of courses around spring 2016. Estimated training throughput for the facility will be approximately 2,000 instructors annually.