Medical Simulation Hones Skills, Improves Patient Safety

Patient safety is a high – if not the number one – priority of any healthcare practitioner. And it's impossible to sever the link between patient safety and overall health care quality: doctors are trained to deliver the best possible care in order to bring about the best possible clinical outcomes. But getting to the point of providing the best care, and the training a doctor must complete in order to gain mastery,takes time. So how can a doctor hone the skills he or she needs to deliver great care without putting an actual patient at risk? Medical Simulation is certainly a good starting point.

Medical simulation, roughly defined, relates to the technology used to train doctors and other healthcare practitioners in a safe environment – at no point during the doctor's education is a patient put at risk. The goal is to reduce errors during clinical practice, including general practice, osteopathic diagnosis, and surgery, as well as improve communication skills between doctors and patients or family members, doctors and clinical support staff members, and doctors and other doctors.

Other healthcare fields such as nursing, physical therapy, pharmacists, physician's assistants, and greater allied health can also benefit from medical simulation training.

Many medical simulation exercises involve the use of standardized patients, or SPs. SPs are actors who have studied a medical condition to the point where they can convincingly portray it – the "patient" acts and reacts in real time to the medical student's observations, examinations, and findings, and later reports on other factors such as the student's bedside manner and communication skills, and whether they completed safety protocols such as hand washing. Realism is a definite benefit of using SPs in medical simulation.

Medical Simulation can also utilize human patient simulators, or mannequins. Medical simulators have come a long way since Resusci Anne, the original mannequin used for CPR training. Modern mannequins are fully-wired. One or more control room operator will talk through the mannequin and activate any number of physical or verbal prompts for the learners to react to—and they are made to blink, bleed, or even go into cardiac arrest, and the learners can make a diagnosis based on the patient's responses, physical state, and vital signs readings.

The trade-off here is that while medical simulation mannequins may not be as realistic as an SP, there's more opportunity for the learner to experience acute emergency situations to hone life-saving decision making skills. Simulated drug injection, wound treatment, and defibrillation can be performed on a mannequin but not an SP.

The use of standardized patients and human patient simulators can also be combined within a single medical simulation event. Consider this scene: a couple is involved in an automobile accident and transported to the emergency room. The husband sustains only minor injuries and is released by the attending physician, while the wife is immediately admitted to urgent care – and the husband is frantically trying to gain access to her bedside. But because the scene is a simulation, the husband is an actor/SP and the wife is a high-fidelity human patient simulator. Learners involved in the simulation exercise can take part in the code exercise and treat the "wife" for her life-threatening wounds while honing communication and interdisciplinary coordination skills while explaining the situation to the "husband." And because this is a simulation, there's no chance of the learner making a mistake that results in patient harm.

Medical Simulation can also take place outside the simulation lab through the power of virtual reality. If you've ever heard of the open source, avatar-based online platform Second Life, you may be able to picture how a virtual online worldcould be used for clinical education. In this instance, a program administrator can build an online clinical environment such as a hospital, doctor's office, or clinic within the platform. Avatars can be created as doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals. Controlled by the learners, the avatars move and manipulate the virtual world, and assess patients, examine vital signs and test results, and even order treatments. What's more, the learners can interact with peers within their school, university, or health system—or with other learners from around the world! Because virtual reality-based medical simulation isn't constricted by time or place, learners might even have an opportunity to boost cultural intelligence and understand how clinicians practice outside of their immediate educational sphere.

All of this leads to clinical safety and better patient outcomes. But what will the future have in store for the increasingly sophisticatedpractice of medical simulation? Check out SIMULATIONiQ.com for some inspiration.

About the Author:

The author of the article has extensive experience in the field of Medical Simulation and Laparoscopy Surgical Trainers.

The writer is an expert in the field of music gifts with focus on Musical Jewelry Boxes & Musical Gift.