April – June 2016

June 2016

Victorian Simulation Alliance (VSA) Regional Symposium

The VSA Regional Symposium 2016 is coming up on the 15th July between 9.30 am to 4.00 pm. It will be hosted by the The Greater Green Triangle Clinical School, Deakin University at  South West Healthcare, Warrnambool, Victoria. The focus of the programs are on the following themes:

  • Innovations & Ideas
  • Simulation on a Shoestring

The cost for VSA members and non-members are $75 and $125, respectively.

The program is available here. For full details on this symposium, go to the VSA official website here.

Upcoming conference: Association of Standardized Patient Educators (ASPE) 2016

The ASPE Annual Conference will be held in Tampa, Florida between 26 to 29 June. Details on the conference, including program and registrations are accessible here.

May 2016

Upcoming conference: International Nursing Association for Clinical Simulation and Learning (INACSL) 2016

INACSL 2016 will be held from 15th to 18th June. The event will be hosted at Gaylord Texan Resort, Grapevine, Texas. Registration is still open and additional details about the conference can be accessed here.

SP perspective from the medical student’s viewpoint

At VSPN, we do feature stories from the perspective of the SPs as well as the educators. However, Chen’s piece (published in in -Training, 27th April 2016), gives an insight to working with SPs from the medical students’ perspective. While she had the experience of working with SPs during her training, in her writing, she recounts what she learned when she interviewed three SPs.

She found similarities between the two sides. The learning, the nervousness, the preparation involved in the process and the camaraderie developed between SPs are not so unlike those of the medical students themselves. During her interview she asked the SPs to share stories about their encounter with the medical students, including those where mistakes occurred, “horror” experiences, funny and heart-warming moments. Though laughter were shared, Chen reiterates that the amusement SPs exudes were not condescending but rather that of a parent seeing the gentle humour in their child’s learning. Chen also akin SPs to mentors for medical students:

…they have the unique position to work with us at every stage of our process… We mature at each step of the way without knowing it. To be able watch us grow and help us improve with their constructive feedback — isn’t that the mission of all mentors?

Read the full piece at here.

Upcoming conference: Society in Europe for Simulation Applied to Medicine (SESAM) 2016

SESAM 2016 will be held in Lisbon, Portugal between 15-17 June.

For registration and initial program details, visit the official site here.

SimulationWeek 2016

SimulationWeek is on between Monday 2 May to Sunday 8 May 2016 this year. This is an online hosted event to showcase the use of simulation and its variety of forms. This event is curated by Simulation Australasia.

For more details, see here.

April 2016

Invitation for Research Involvement regarding the use of observer role in healthcare simulation

Below is an invitation for research involvement by PhD candidate, Stephanie O’Regan who currently works in simulation education in Sydney.  Her research investigates the use of the observer roles in healthcare simulation. If you are an educator who uses mannequin or simulated patients in Australia and New Zealand, she would like to invite you to participate in a survey.

Please read the attached survey explanatory statement (explanatory-statement-Survey-Group) and if you agree to participate in the survey please click on the link below. It is estimated that the survey will take no more than 20 minutes to complete.  

The link to the survey is here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Simulation_educator_survey

SimEd: Review on a workshop for developing a simulation course at International Meeting for Simulation in Healthcare (IMSH) 2016

This piece was contributed by Lesley McKarney and published via SimEd.

McKarney wrote about her experience at the IMSH 2016 held at San Diego, CA earlier this January. She summarised the things that she had learned about developing a simulation course from a workshop she had attended. The workshop was entitled: Build a Simulation Instructor.

The full piece is available here.

Unannounced Standardized Patient (USP) as a mean to evaluate medical healthcare

Schwartz and Weiner discussed the value that USPs may bring to the quality assurance process during a medical encounter (Why we need “mystery shoppers” directly observing health care – published on 21/02/2016 in Oxford University Press (OUP) Blog). OSPs are trained actors who present the same script to a number of different doctors with the purpose of comparing how each manage the same patient.

Despite the value, the authors believed that working with USPs are under utilised due to the following reasons: i) the complexity of sending a USP undetected into healthcare practices; ii)  the question if such methodology is scalable given the varied and thousands of clinical settings around the country and; iii) practitioners may find the practice of USPs daunting to deal with. For each challenges, the authors offered counter-proposals as to how USP methodology can benefit the medical practitioners, patients and the industry alike.

Read the full article here.

SP Program in the Spotlight: Harvard Medical School

Powell’s piece entitled Real as heart attack, almost showcased the SP program at Harvard Medical School. The program is administered by the HMS Center for Evaluation and is part of the four-year medical program at the school. Students get to work with SPs during OSCE. Each session lasts for about 20 minutes, including 5 minutes devoted to feedback. Encounters are recorded as well as observed via a one-way mirror. While each student consults with seven SPs during the clinical examination, the SPs will see roughly about 170 students in a class. SPs are recruited and trained externally via University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center, Worcester. However, scenarios and scripts are written within HMS.

This article is published in the Harvard Gazette on 17 March 2016.

Read more about this SP program in the full article, here.