By Jamie Thompson
EMS1 Senior Editor
Training managers should tie their simulation equipment purchases to the outcomes they hope to achieve with their programs, a health care education event was told Wednesday.
Geoff Miller, of the Gordon Center for Research in Medical Education in Miami, said while the question of choosing which specific products to buy could be challenging, there are steps purchasers can take to ease the process.
“If you look at the outcomes that you want to achieve then you can tie those outcomes to the equipment and come to the right conclusion,” he said.
Miller, the associate director of research and curriculum development for the division of pre-hospital and emergency health care, offered the advice during Laerdal’s Simulation User Network meeting in San Francisco.
Improve training
The event brought together simulation learners, users and experts from across the health care spectrum to help improve training and purchasing decisions.
One of the key components of putting together a multidisciplinary simulation program together, Miller said, is to utilize as many different learning methods as possible.
“With a multidisciplinary learning team, there will be lots of different learning levels and lots of different learning types,” he said. “People receive and acquire information differently.”
In addition, the use of video during simulations can significantly enhance the learning experience during post-training debriefing, Miller said.
“I think it’s a very valuable tool, but there are some good techniques for good video use,” he said.
“Just sitting down and watching the entire video may not be very effective at all. But if you can pick out that one golden nugget that may be 30 seconds, you can say, ‘Let’s talk about what happened there and what were you thinking right at that moment.’”
Miller told the session that there is a range of multidisciplinary simulation opportunities, including:
- Code teams
- Rapid response teams
- Surgical cases
- Crisis resource management
- Patient safety problems
- Airway management
More than 150 people from various health care fields attended the three-day Sim User Network meeting in San Francisco, with Laerdal hosting the events in cities across North America.